The Tuque Souq

FINCA: Exploitative Fundraising or Successful Direct Marketing?

2012-02-05T10:10:00.004-05:00

Last week I received an envelope in the mail from the Foundation for International Community Assistance, or FINCA, which consisted of this:

Three photographs of women presenting a form of livelihood to the camera, with a letter from FINCA president and CEO Rupert W. Scofield informing me about "micro-entrepreneurship," "village banks," and how my "donation of $50 or more" can empower poor women like "Dominga" and "Robinah" (not pictured), whose brief tales of former woe and current hope are offered up as proof of FINCA's commitment and success.

As an experienced communications manager and advisor in the non-profit/NGO sector, I'm very curious about these kinds of promotions. When I see something like this, there are 5 things that immediately come to mind:

1) Who are the women (and the child) in the photographs?
2) Who is the photographer(s)?
3) Under what circumstances were the photographs taken?
4) Does the letter inform me of how my donation is managed/governed?
5) Am I encouraged to seek out more information before becoming a donor?

So how did FINCA do with respect to these five benchmarks?

1) The photographs are actually cards, and inside each is the full name, home town (or in one case only home country) and brief success story of each woman. The child's name and relationship to the woman in that photograph are not mentioned.

2) The photographers are not named anywhere. I believe the photographer should always be credited (even though this is not standard practice with NGOs) in campaigns such as this, both for credit/copyright of an original creation (based on my experience these photos were probably taken by a frontline fieldworker who has no idea about the copyright he/she holds), and for accountability, such as #3 below.

3) The circumstances are very important: Did the subjects assent to their photograph being taken and their image being used for direct marketing? How did they give their assent and what assurances are there that they understood the concept of what FINCA was doing with their image. There is no mention of this anywhere in FINCA's information. Not that this is surprising or that FINCA is alone in neglecting this.

There is no mention of the child's assent to participate, which is a guideline of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and standard Child Rights policies that most international NGOs keep. Not naming the child (a child's right to privacy) is a good practice endorsed by the framework of the CRC, yet this is undermined by using the image of the child without her assent.

It's worth noting that among NGOs the standard practice is to blanket themselves in Child Rights and other policies and therefore not have to invoke them at every turn. My point is that in the case of fundraising and marketing by an NGO, transparency must reach another level, and FINCA fails.

4) There is no mention of FINCA's fiscal accountability in the letter, save for a mention in Mr. Scofield's postscript that "93 cents of every dollar donated to FINCA directly supports client services." This is an impressive but wholly misleading figure. If we are to infer from this marketable statistic that 93% of donations (or 93% of all FINCA's income) are spent servicing the grassroots financial-aid programs for the beneficiaries (the Domingas and Robinahs) and only 7% on administrative and personnel costs of FINCA and its partner NGOs in the field -- well, if true that would be remarkable.

FINCA does, as it should, publish its financial statements for the public to scrutinize. Nowhere within those pages could the average person interpret the "93 cents" remark. FINCA is a $500-million non-profit charitable organization that is also a bank with a corporate business model. In 2010 it collected $7m in grants, $14m in donations, and $163m in gross interest earned. It spent $81m on personnel and $56m on operating expenses (also spending on taxes, interest and foreign exchange), and curiously (for a non-profit) reported a $10-million profit. Which 93 cents of which of those dollars went to which client services?

If 93% of the $14 million in donations alone goes to "client services," my response is: Why not 100%? Donations seem to be such a small part of FINCA's total budget, and in fact come close to matching reported profit. Did FINCA think that 93% was a more believable (e.g. marketable) number than 100%?

Naturally nowhere in his letter (or in FINCA's financial statements) does Robert W. Scofield mention that his annual salary is $317,281, or more than double the median CEO salary in the non-profit industry. The same source -- the Better Business Bureau -- that reported his salary also reported that FINCA's financial statements do not meet the standards of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP); FINCA like many NGOs holds itself to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) instead.

5) This, of course, is a trick question. It's antithetical to a marketing campaign to invite its audience to seek critical counsel before donating. Even if I were FINCA's communications director I'd be hard pressed slip such a gilded layer of transparency past a marketing team besotted with donor-friendly photographs of smiling foreign women. Again, my point is based on holding NGOs, charities and non-profits to a higher standard than for-profit, consumer-based organizations.

This post in no way has been devised to malign FINCA; I am not accusing them of any duplicity or mismanagement, nor am I aware of their reputation amongst their donors, partners and beneficiaries. FINCA sent this unsolicited letter to me. And this is my response. I'm simply posing as a very stubborn consumer. And no, they will not be getting my $50. Not today.

'Off the Page' interview series launches on the Magazine Awards blog

2012-01-26T20:34:00.000-05:00

A special note from the Department of Blogger Self Reference (Non-Egregious Division): The Magazine Awards blog (the official blog of the National Magazine Awards Foundation) earlier this month debuted a weekly interview series called "Off the Page."

Off the Page is an exclusive new series produced by the NMAF that reaches out to former National Magazine Award winners to find out what their awards have meant to them and what they’re up to now. Off the Page will appear regularly on the NMA blog during the winter and spring of 2012.

The interview series is underway, with profiles of National Magazine Award-winning writers Carol Shaben, Jeremy Klaszus and Alex Leslie, plus illustrator Roxanna Bikadoroff. I happen to know that in the coming weeks they'll be catching up with an intrepid Canadian photojournalist, a young Toronto writer with a "hot" new book, plus a fantastic Quebec journalist in a special interview to be presented en forme bilingue.

Your humble Tuque Souq blogger is the author of said Magazine Awards blog, in my capacity as contract Special Projects Manager of the NMAF. Thus I whole-heartedly endorse your clicking over immediately and introducing yourself to "Off the Page" and the Magazine Awards blog.

Explorations in the Apocryphal Spelling of Tuque

2012-01-19T07:55:00.025-05:00

Friends, nothing is dearer to this blog than the sanctity of its allonym. So consider us being true to our own self if we stick to our tuque and pan its increasingly common yet wholly unaccredited, malapropistic alternate spelling: touque.

It hit a little close to home this past Christmas.

Christmas gift to the Tuque Souq: Love the mug; loathe the spelling

Alas, alas. It's one thing to be some blogger with an innocent orthographic handicap (like this tumblr blog devoted to the "touque") or this guy with a bug up his arse about "toques."[1]

But if you're going to plant copy on a mug[2], please call us before going to press. At no extra charge, we'll tell you: It's a tuque.

Notwithstanding the Urban Dictionary's sparkling third definition of touque -- "an uncircumcised penis" -- the only legitimate use of the "touque" spelling concerns any reference to the Touque family, a noble Kentish lineage of merry old England with an ancestry stretching to the Norman Conquest.

Touques can wear touques -- that's their English business. And if they're chefs they might don toques. But we wear tuques, especially when drinking our coffee on a cold winter's morn.

[1] Bug or no bug, it's still our second-most read blog post of all time, after this one
[2] Support local artists, like the woman who made this mug, who does some lovely work, all kidding aside

Adventures in Advenience: The Return of a Photographic Moment

2012-01-12T09:18:00.002-05:00

Nine years ago this month I dropped anchor in Tunisia for a six-month contract teaching English at a school in the seaside city of Sousse, packing along with me little besides my old Canon single lens reflex, an 18mm wide-angle lens and a few dozen rolls of Ilford FP4.

I worked six days a week, so when that seventh day came round I was on a bus or a train somewhere into countryside as far as I could get. But it wasn't till shortly before my departure that I was able to devote an entire week to a voyage into the Sahara, at least to its border towns and not-too-distant oases.

It was a hermetic experience: late May in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, the Chott el-Djerid salt flats, and beyond them the Sahara -- with their mirages, siestas, scorpions and utter lack of tourists -- is conducive to isolation and meditation, and I found myself subsisting on a diet of bread, water, the kindness of strangers and contemplations of photography.

Two years later, after a fleeting photo exhibition, I was commissioned by my alumni magazine to write a reflection of my own alongside some of those photographs of Tunisia. At that time I happened to be reading a gifted copy of Camera Lucida, a reflection on photography by the French philosopher Roland Barthes.

For the magazine I penned a brief, recollected imagining of my experience behind the lens in the Tunisian desert, and in it I recalled my introduction to Barthes' concept of advenience, a term he employed to summarize his personal experience -- physical and emotional -- of encountering certain moving photographs.

In my reflection on reading Barthes and photographing Tunisia as a foreigner in a studious, contemplative mood, I was inspired in a moment to define advenience as "the adventuresome adding of a new perspective to the whole" and thereby tie the experience of the photographer to that of the hypothetical viewer in a loose continuum of photographic intimacy.

The magazine published the piece, I dutifully added it to my CV, and that seemed to wrap up tidily the Tunisia chapter of my life (aside from my lasting support for the country's and Sousse's soccer teams).

That is, until about a month ago, when I received a phone call in the middle of a busy Friday afternoon from a certain Sarah in Kansas City. She was excited. There was something about a college, an exhibit and some students, but before I knew exactly what was hurtling through the receiver, I heard her reciting back to me my long tucked-away definition of advenience.

As it happened, the photography students at the Kansas City Art Institute were about to debut that very evening an exhibition called advenience (or, an adventursome adding of a new perspective to the whole).

Photograph courtesy Sarah Taylor, Kansas City Art Institute

The phone call was equal parts courtesy, flattery and (possibly) last-minute due diligence for my acknowledgement.

Its effect, however, was to re-awaken me to the ecology of inspiration: if a handful of photography students can unite a particular collective photographic experience behind a google search result of an obscure academicky term that years ago I employed to interpret the momentary euphoria of clicking the shutter in a certain place and time, then perhaps we can interpret inspiration as a kind of aperture that opens up between an individual and his or her world; the sudden entrance of light onto dark, a new perspective on the whole.

The adventure continues.

Life Magazine Ads: Year in Pictures 1988

2012-01-09T11:21:00.001-05:00

Chanced upon a copy of Life magazine's "Year in Pictures 1988" (published January 1989). Aside from all the coverage of some guy named Dukakis were these spectacular advertisements from the days of yore:

See the full gallery of thirty ads from Life's "Year in Pictures 1988"

BBC investigates the politics of NGOs in India

2012-01-05T08:44:00.004-05:00

What do non-governmental organizations (NGOs) really do to improve the lives of people in developing countries and work for sustainable development of impoverished and oppressed societies?

Plenty, as I learned in India over the course of a year with an exceptionally dedicated and scrupulous NGO called PREM. But the world of NGOs and so-called development, like many a human endeavor, is rife with contradiction, corruption and power politics.

Part 2 of a new three-part radio documentary by Allan Little called "The Truth about NGOs" examines the complex and ever-changing world NGOs inhabit in India. Though the focus is mainly on Mumbai, not on the rural jungles of Odisha, many of the issues are the same: credibility, transparency, efficacy, relevance and corruption (both ethical and fiduciary). Further, it explores in basic detail the complicated relationship between NGOs and government, and the role of the wealthy, powerful and often out-of-touch international NGOs (e.g. Oxfam, Save the Children, others).

Part 1 of Allan Little's NGO reportage examined NGO involvement in influencing government and policy in Malawi, and in foisting Western cultural values onto local society via the power vested in them by the money these NGOs receive from foreign donors. What is a human rights struggle in the West (gay marriage, e.g., or economic equality) becomes a form of neo-colonialism in Africa. And by making local NGOs dependent on this stream of funding, the foreign donors and the agendas they represent and can wield wide-ranging, undemocratic power in the developing world. It's no stretch to imagine that local government and those opposed to NGOs can paint them as agents of a new imperialism.

Part 3, on Haiti, is airing this week.

[Tip of the hat to Dean Bradley for alerting us to these documentaries.]

Jenin's Freedom Theatre Embraces 2012

2012-01-03T00:01:00.004-05:00

2011 was a year of tough perseverance for the Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp, Palestine. The joint Palestinian-Israeli project -- a collective community rehabilitation endeavor, art school and theatre troupe -- suffered an enormous tragedy with the April 4 murder (still unsolved) of its founder and leader, Juliano Mer Khamis.

Israeli military raids into Jenin Refugee Camp have intensified lately, with the targets including Freedom Theatre volunteers. Co-founder Zakaria Zubeidi, a former leader of the camp's armed resistance to Israeli occupation who renounced violence in 2006, recently had his amnesty revoked by Israel and faces possible re-arrest.

To welcome a new and hopefully more peaceful year, the Freedom Theatre is engaging supporters in a fundraising campaign to sustain its various programs, including the acting school, photography school, community art projects and stage productions. From its latest press release:

The accomplishments of The Freedom Theatre over the past six years are many and we are confident that we will continue implementing creative projects that change the lives of children and youth in the local community – but we need your assistance. You can best help us by signing up for a monthly donation program, becoming a long-term partner of The Freedom Theatre. We hope to get 1000 people from around the world to donate at least 10 USD/EUR or equivalent per month.

If you're so inclined, please support the Freedom Theatre. For more information [shameless plug alert] check out this 2007 article from This Magazine, written by Tuque Souq author Richard A. Johnson.

Freedom Theatre opens new production on a new stage

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T22:50:00.005-05:00

Happy 2012 from the Tuque Souq. We're undergoing a wee redesign in both the visual and conceptual senses. Please bear with us; we'll have the souq all cleaned up and ready for the new year soon.

Vote for 'Adivasi Community Preschool'

2011-10-02T07:38:00.005-04:00

There are still two more days to vote in this year's Click About It international photography competition, in partnership with OxFam. Your humble blogger is in the running, with an exhibit called Adivasi Community Preschool.

Click here to see my entry, all entries and more information about the contest. Public voting ends October 3, after which the contest's own judges weigh in. The winner is announced October 12.

[Update Oct 12: The winners have been announced and can be found here.]

101 Icelandic: A Thorough Tongue-Twisting Trek Through a Thwarting Language

2011-09-30T10:24:00.002-04:00

It is entirely possible that the most garrulous person in all of Iceland is a man who spends most of his day alone on a mountain ridge between two volcanoes. Sigurður Sigurðursson is a seasonal warden of a lonely trekkers hut at a place called Fimmvörðuháls, and if you think you can hike up to his domain for a cozy night underneath the aurora borealis without learning how to pronounce Fimmvörðuháls--and without developing an affinity for the Icelandic language--you are sorely mistaken.

It's simple when you chop it down to the roots, he says (and given the lunar landscape of his realm he's certainly not talking about trees). Fimm is five. Vörð (pronounced vordh) is cairn. Háls is neck. The Neck of the Five Cairns. That's where we are.*

As he pours a cup of tea from the snow he kindly melts for all his guests (the nearest stream is about 2km away), Sigurður continues the lesson. He is wearing insulated snow pants held up over his robust middle with suspenders, and his high, round cheeks are rosy from a long day spent hammering trail-marking stakes into the ground; there is a semblance of a bald, beardless Santa Claus about his presence. It's a mid-September afternoon, but it's only three degrees at Fimmvörðuháls.**

Over there, he points out the window, is Mýrdalsjökull. Mýr is a wetland. Dal is a valley.*** Jökull is, of course, a glacier. The Wetland Valley Glacier. Behind it is þórsmörk, the Forest of Thor.**** Nearby is Goðaland, Land of the Gods. And of course on the other side is Eyjafjallajökull, Island Mountain Glacier.

Now you see how we Icelanders name our places.

Many travellers find Icelanders to be quiet. People of few words. Lukewarm and distant, like the local sun. But the irrepressible Sigurður would not shut up about the joy that is the Icelandic language until we had tied our tongues in knots and surrendered from the lesson.

The cosmology of a place as small (pop. 320,000), as rugged (63% of the surface area is classified as "wasteland") and as isolated (no continent to call its own) as Iceland is by necessity both simple and puristic. After all, following its initial settlement era in the ninth and tenth centuries the country was set upon and dominated if not outright ruled by Norwegians, Danes, Scots, British, French, Spanish, Basques, Germans, Russians, Japanese, Americans and even Algerian pirates; by their fishing fleets and military alliances and political tyrants.

Apropos of which, the naming of places in Iceland has long been marked with utilitarian strokes, almost as if to convince outsiders of their insignificance, or to convince Icelanders not to get too sentimental about their homeland.

And further, the Icelandic language beginning in the nineteenth century went through a purist movement (which evolved into a full-fledged government language committee and language institute) both to protect and to cultivate the Icelandic linguistic heritage. Among its sphere of influence is the coining of neologisms and the, er, Icelandicizing of loanwords.

In an oft-cited example, the Icelandic word for computer, tölva, is a portmanteau of the word tala ("number") and völva ("oracle"). An Oracle of Numbers, not a kömpútur.

In 1973 they even banished the letter z from the alphabet. Why? Not Icelandic. (Thanks but no thanks, England.)

So perhaps it was no coincidence that the ostensibly hermitic Sigurður (who actually spends most of the year living and working in Reykjavik) was the most talkative person we encountered in Iceland. He sits at a crossroads of some of the simplest, most unutterable toponyms in all of the country, and most of his interactions are with thrill-seeking volcano trekkers from far-flung lands, most of whom only half-heartedly attempt to pronounce Fimmvörðuháls before giggling and sighing, cute little Iceland.

Sigurður has heard it all. And like others before him, he's determined to Icelandicize your tongue, to send you on your way with a bit more respect for this rugged, hardly diminutive country than when you arrived.

We thanked him and trekked down the mountain. A few days later we found ourselves at Snæfellsnes. Snow Mountain Peninsula. We hiked up to Djúpalonssandur and down to Önverðarnes. And yeah, sometimes we wished there existed a Sigurður iPhone app to help us. But we sputtered Icelandic place names into the wind and giggled slightly less. He'd taught us well.

* To clear up the confusion, the sign in the photo points to Fimmvorðuskáli. Skáli is the Icelandic for hall or hut, which here means Sigurður's hut on Fimmvorðuháls.
** Celsius.
*** Mýr and Dal, if you look closely, resemble the English words "mire" and "dale." Not a coincidence.
**** The runic þ is an awesome letter and should be Iceland's next export, after the haddock run out.

This way to Thor's favourite Peninsula.

I, uh, Felt a Jokull (and other Icelandic things)

2011-09-27T19:11:00.046-04:00

It had to be high on the list of places to visit in Iceland: Eyjafjallajökull, the ice cap and eponymous volcano that just a year ago erupted with more fury than a stampede of sheep, spewing clouds of ash across Europe and sending air-traffic controllers on a long-sought holiday (by train, of course).

How could one visit the land of jökulls and not deposit a soft, black footprint on the slopes of this tongue twister ("aye, if yet, la yokel"), if only to ensure that, at least at one particular moment, nature has relaxed its cycle of self-correction long enough for us humans to venture out of our caves?

In Iceland the natural world certainly has a way of reminding us not to take it for granted. Maybe it's the way the sun always seems so distant, at a languid low angle, as though Terrence Malick is in control of the lighting. Maybe it's in the wind, which blows up, down, warm, cold, east and west, seemingly all at once. Maybe it's the absence of trees, a taut lesson that what goes down doesn't always come back up.*

Terrence Malick was here.

Or maybe it's the way those infamous volcanoes keep all but the most brennevín-sodden of Icelanders (and the rest of us) continually on their toes.

Thus, climbing up and setting foot on Eyjafjallajökull is sort of the human way of letting nature know that, hey, point taken.

The ice and volcanic dunes of Eyjafjallajokull, 13 September 2011.

Last year a small chunk of the world fumed right back at the Icelandic volcano, angrily protesting the flight delays and the soporific haze drifting through all that clean, human air. But in fact, the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull (c'mon, you can say it) was one of the drowsiest by Icelandic standards.

If you want to talk about devastation, look no further than Lakagígar, the largest volcanic eruption in history.** In the summer of 1783 this twenty-five-kilometre long hole in the Earth exploded, darkening the skies of the world, blighting harvests, decimating flora and fauna, emitting rivers of fire and clouds of poisonous sulfuric gas continuously for eight months.

Lakagígar was so colossal it lowered the mean atmospheric temperature of the planet by nearly five degrees Celsius over a year. Its devastation of crop and livestock in Iceland was responsible for the deaths of 10,000 inhabitants; one-fifth of the entire population at the time. It also got me an A in freshman-year volcanology.***

Being that the deadly Icelandic eruption that caused Benjamin Franklin to posit an early theory of the delicate relationship between atmospheric composition and climate change also got me through that rough first year of university, I'd have been remiss if I didn't pay homage to this volcano, too.

Iceland is like nature's geological laboratory, an open-air museum of Earth's majestic, barely comprehensible dynamism dedicated singularly to making us feel very, very insignificant. A simple footprint is a supreme act of reverence. Point taken, world. I'll never complain about a delayed flight again.

* Just as Jared Diamond foretold.
** By volume of effluent, not by number of flights cancelled.
*** That course, Geosciences 1303, is still offered. Also, the grade was actually an A-minus, which is to an A what Eyjafjallajokull is to Lakagigar; differently uttered but similarly impressive from the vantage of something small, like a bee.

Discovery with a Paddle: Canoeing the Restoule and French Rivers

2011-08-10T10:44:00.004-04:00

When Samuel Champlain paddled down the Restoule River with a party of Ottawa nation aboriginals in the early ~~sixteenth~~ seventeenth century, he believed he was beating a trail of discovery to a great, westward river that would lead to the mer de l'ouest, the ocean on the far side of what was, to Europeans, a new found land.

In the Canada of Champlain's peers, the frontier emerged from obscurity beneath each footstep and paddle stroke of he and his men. What became known as the French River was the first of many underestimations of Champlain, who was by all evidence one of the more gifted of the early European explorers of North America.

Champlain stood at the confluence of the Restoule and French Rivers and believed the latter flowed over the western horizon to the salted sea. (No doubt his indigenous guides, who may never have come across anything but fresh water during their inland lives, struggled in translation with this alien concept of saltwater.)

Champlain was wrong. But in his wrongness, he made if not a discovery then at least a revelation.

It may have dawned on him that he was experiencing the seduction of terra incognita. It's what we draw on maps before we ever experience the place to be mapped. It's what we claim as our own before we know if it can even be gained, let alone held and owned. It's what traps us into confusing our passion for discovery with a conquering of nature.[1]

So powerful is the force behind exploration that it can place a child's imagination inside the cunning mind of a man.

As Jean Baudrillard wrote of cartography in the postmodern age, "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.... It is the map that precedes the territory."[2]

The map, like Champlain's belief in a river to the sea in the middle of Ontario, is our imagination, our longing to explore. It is in some ways essential to our path. But it--and not the wilderness--is what must be gained and held.

What drives us to discover that which we do not know cannot be placed on a map. No matter what it promised on his map--no matter that he ended up with Georgian Bay instead of the Pacific Ocean, which turned out to be of no small import to Europeans--Champlain's only real discovery was that in going beyond his known frontier, he released the child inside him to explore a true wilderness.

What Francis Younghusband humbly wrote about the Himalaya applies well to the wilderness discovery narrative in general: "To those who have struggled with them the mountains reveal beauties they will not disclose to those who make no effort. And it is because they have so much to give and give it so lavishly to those who will wrestle with them that men love mountains and go back to them again and again."[3]

And so seduced, eager and aware, our group went a-paddling where Champlain had dreamt of reaching the far side of the world.

Our Route

The Champlain Loop along the Restoule and French Rivers we did in five days (many do it in four).[4]

Day 1: Approximately 46° 4' 2'' North latitude by 79° 46' 24'' West longitude is the starting point. From the south shore of Stormy Lake in Restoule Provincial Park paddling westward into the Restoule River, via the Scott's Dam portage (270m), and into a beautiful campground with good fishing on the south shore of Lennon Lake, which is no more than a widening of the river. 11km plus 1 portage.

Day 2: The remainder of the Restoule River westward with a portage (270m) around MacArthur's Rapids (CII; too low in August to run) and another portage (700m) around the series of falls down to the French. Out into Restoule Bay and the French River, through a small maze of islands and bays to a peninsula campsite (by far the least attractive of the trip) just opposite the bridge over Chaudiere Rapids. 14km plus 2 portages.

Day 3: Chaudiere portage (600m) leads into the southern bay of the Upper French River. Paddle hard (in headwinds and a downpour of rain, for us) around the islands east of the First Nation town of Dokis all the way up to Satchel's Bay, then to a glorious and surprisingly secluded campsite at the eastern tip of Sumner Island. 12km plus 1 portage.

Day 4: Back into the French River toward the vast expanse of Lake Nipissing, around into Frank's Bay to find the mouth of Shoal Creek. A 3.5-hour zigzagging course through the creek's marshes (and over nearly a dozen beaver dams) is exciting but ultimately exhausting, and involves three short portages (90m, 45m and 50m) around rocks. Over the final beaver dam is found the clear waters of Shoal Lake, with a large campsite near plentiful fishing holes on the far eastern shore. 15km plus 3 portages.

Day 5: The day of four lakes, from Shoal Lake to a portage (800m) that leads to Bass Lake, across which is another portage (900m) that ends at the western shore of Watt (sometimes called Clear) Lake. Traversing Watt Lake to its end the waters open up southward into Stormy Lake, heading back to the starting point at Restoule Provincial Park. 11km plus 2 portages.

Photographs copyright Richard A. Johnson. Taken with the great Holga 120N plastic camera, with Ilford HP5. Click here to view the full photo gallery.

Oh, and there are other great photographs by fellow expedition members Dean and Mike.

[1] Inspired by chapters 2 and 7 of Where is Here?: Canada's Maps and the Stories They Tell by Alan Morantz, a book I kept closed until I could take it on this trip, and which is highly recommended as a companion read to this particular expedition.

[2] Quoted in Morantz's book, p.147

[3] From Mount Everest: Reconnaissance (1921); quoted in Sierra Nevada by Ansel Adams, 1938.

[4] Our guidebook was A Paddler's Guide to Killarney and the French River by Kevin Callan, which unfortunately was of little use beyond whetting our appetites for the trip. Though it contains a few snippets of advice regarding portages and campsites, those snippets are maddeningly incomplete by guidebook standards, and most of the narrative is narrowly anecdotal of a trip the author took many years ago. An internet search for trip advice and the purchase of topographic maps were more essential to planning.

Blazing Paddles

2011-07-29T08:20:00.025-04:00

The Tuque Souq is pointing its compass north by northwest by slightly southeast with a right turn in there somewhere, on a bit of a hiatus. Everyone should believe in something, said Thoreau. I believe I'll go canoeing.

Markets of the World: A fresh take on food, photography and book publishing

2011-07-07T08:29:00.008-04:00

Anyone who finds sterility and repetition lurking in the food-and-foodie assault on popular culture, or perhaps a fetid insouciance in photography book publishing--one pass by the bookshelves at the mega chain stores reveals that sellers have not lost their desire to peddle large-format photo spreads on Tuscan herb gardens or the Earth as seen from a rich man's helicopter--is likely to be refreshed by a new book, Markets of the World, by Toronto photographer Dean Bradley.

For an audience that doubtless craves an authentic, humble take on the photographic discovery of the simple pleasures in life, the book is an exhibition not just of talent and creativity but also of exploration and connection.

The market in Mr. Bradley's vision is a community crossroads, both a vibrant intersection of social threads and a common starting point for diverse moments of inspiration, from an evening meal to a flower arrangement to a special gift. The market is colour (p50), conviviality (p32), craftsmanship (p47), enthusiasm (p37), discovery (p71), simplicity (p39) and raw beauty (p27).

Part imaginative travel memoir, part photography exhibit of markets as far flung as Australia (the Sydney fish market), Spain (Valencia's mercado and Barcelona's boqueria), Cambodia, Vietnam, Morocco, Istanbul, Amsterdam and a dozen more, Markets of the World is truly an exploration of quotidian adventure.

(Mr. Bradley's YouTube channel contains a short video of himself eagerly opening the initial shipment of first editions outside his Toronto home. No doubt we can all identify with and admire the child inside this moment of discovery.)

Last week the intrepid photographer launched the self-published book at the classy, clean-lined Miele Gallery in the upstairs Market Kitchen of St. Lawrence Market in Toronto (St. Lawrence Market is also featured in the book), where dozens of guests and photography enthusiasts mingled among the exhibit of Mr. Bradley's work and sampled fresh hors d'oeuvres made from produce from just downstairs.

It's a rare treat to find a photography book whose essence is no more or less than the artist's passion for his craft and the life in what surrounds him.

Markets of the World ($29.95; hardcover; 103 pages) is available at independent GTA bookstores such as Another Story, Nicholas Hoare, Type Books, Ben McNally, Book City and A Different Drummer Books, as well as at Ten Thousand Villages. It can also be purchased online from the photographer's website www.photosbydean.ca.

Bill Moyers reads Magazines Upside-Down

2011-06-30T10:13:00.002-04:00

"Lying in bed at night, reading. Magazines mostly. It's amazing how many places you can go with a stack of magazines while flat on your back."

--Bill Moyers, quoted in the July 2011 issue of Vanity Fair, in the back-of-book Proust Questionnaire; asked what his favourite occupation is. The veteran American journo also professes his love for Dr. Seuss, Steinbeck and his Peace Corps days. Seems to have the important things in life sorted out.

Brain-Eating Zombie Fungus is Selfish SOB

2011-06-23T08:05:00.001-04:00

"Tropical carpenter ants who are zombified by brain fungus are thereafter compelled, at solar noon, to latch on to the main vein on the underside of a leaf, readying them for death in a spot ideally suited to the fungus's well-being."
--Harper's magazine, "Findings"; July 2011

This is simply a fantastic sentence. And its subject matter reminds one of the spectacular clip of the ant-eating brain fungus from the Planet Earth series.

(Left: A mature brain fungus clings to a tree. And to think, it all started with one brainy ant.)

And with that, I'm finally caught up on six months' worth of Harper's.

Oh Aubergine: Etymology of an Eggplant

2011-06-16T09:33:00.004-04:00

In India I learned most of the local language at the School of Hard Knocks, otherwise known as the vegetable market. Elbowing my way through the horde of pickers, it was:
"I'll take that one, what do you call it?"
Brinjal.
"Ach-cha, I'll take chaari."*
What do they call them in your country?
"Aubergine. Or sometimes eggplant."
Egg. Plant?

The vegetable in question is native to southern India, where it was originally known as vatinganah (in Sanskrit). Legend holds that this word, broken up, literally means "fart, go away!" But this ain't true.

From India the purple perennial travelled west and became badinjāna (Persian) and الباذنجان (al-badhinjān; Arabic). In the 11th century Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna) observed that the badhinjān generates melancholy and obstructions.

In some modern Arabic dialects the word passes the ears as baydhinjān, which sounds like it derives from "egg" (baydh) or "house" (bayt) "of the devil" (ad-djinn).**

The veggie encroached upon Europe from two sides. In the west, Arabic influence led to the Spanish berenjena from whence came albergínia (Catalan) and aubergine (Middle French).

The Greeks went with melitzána from which the Italians took melongena (Latin) and later the modern melanzana, to which they ascribed an apocryphal etymology of mela inzana or "mad apple."

Actual 15th-century promotional
poster of the Yiddish Aubergine
Importers Cooperative

The Turkish patlecan, probably another offshoot of the Persian, is thought to be responsible for the Yiddish פּאַטלעזשאַן (patlezhan). And, though the Greeks clearly spurned the Turkish derivation, Serbs and Croats call it patlidžan and the Hungarians padlizsán. In Russia it's baklažan.

And somewhere in all this running around, again probably via those intrepid Persians, the bulbous nightshade went to Armenia and became batilgian, which when correctly pronounced sounds exactly like "bottle-john."

Back east, the language of Hindi/Urdu evolved and vatinganah with the aid of Persian influence became brinjaul or brinjal. Indian migration carried brinjal to South Africa, and then further to the West Indies as brinjalle which was then folk-etymologized as "brown jolly."

The English took the French aubergine and, sometimes for fun, "mad apple" from the Italians. But it was the popularity of white aubergines (nee Eierfrucht in German) that eventually took over the English designation. This albino phenomenon, which grew yellowish or totally white and resembled a large egg, went north to Scandinavia, since the Norse and Icelandic word eggaldin is, like the German, literally "eggfruit."

But "fruit" was further generalized into "plant," perhaps to keep people from looking in trees to find them. The development of the Swedish and Danish Äggplanta is similar to what Americans did to get to eggplant.***

So what do they use brinjal for in your country?
"Well, we make baba ghanouj."
What is this?
"It's a Middle Eastern eggplant dip."
Where is the Middle East?
"Um, western Asia."
What is dip?
"Uh, cold curry that you eat with chips."
But your country is so cold. Why do you eat cold things?
[Still searching for an answer.]

* In Oriya ach-cha can mean "cool," and chaari is eka-duyi-tini-chaari (i.e. "four").
** In his legendary Arabic-English Lexicon (Book 1, p 145) the linguist Edward William Lane notes that among early Arabic nicknames for baadhinjaan were tuffaah al-hubbi ("love apple") and tuffaah dhahabi ("golden apple").
*** "Aubergine" in various other languages

Behind the Scenes at the 34th National Magazine Awards

2011-06-11T16:28:00.006-04:00

Last night Canadian magaziners feted themselves with due and tasteful pomp at the annual National Magazine Awards.

For my multi-pronged role* as the NMA show stage manager, program editor, script composer and ticket-queue improv greeter, I was rewarded with backstage access which, coupled with the sobriety that outlasted most others in attendance, has yielded a few memorable impressions of the soiree.

Jacqueline Hennessy absolutely rocked the MC gig, employing the best kind of wit for this crowd (the succinct, self-deprecating kind; and all the funny bits were of her, not my, writing).

And she ran the tightest show on the NMA stage perhaps since Pierre Berton brandished a cane and aimed it at anyone who got within 10 feet of the podium to attempt a thank-you speech.

(Indeed, on several occasions Jacqueline was faster than the speed of the stage lights, which might be related to the fact that she was on her feet for hours wearing impressive 3-inch stilettos while staring at 600 people who were enjoying a very comfy collective slouch.)

By her own admission Jacqueline was at least as hot an MC as the pantheonic Scott Feschuk, but judging by the manner in which a few of the male award-winners appeared punch-drunk at the podium after receiving a double cheek peck from Jacqueline, there's still plenty of room for Feschuk to improve.

I thought the food was excellent. I do love it when the hors d'oeuvre servers at The Carlu dish out considerate whispers to guests that "this is dinner"; alas, inhabiting a realm beyond the magazine industry they don't know that:
A) Most guests fill their bellies before arrival so they can focus all their considerable instinctive faculties on hunting down complimenatry wine; and
B) The food, despite appearing diminutive on those wee plates, actually never runs out. (By midnight the servers may have been zonked and a few guests were seen delivering plates of tortilla rolls and sliders to the very slowly thinning horde of hangers on.)

And although magazines are often labelled as traditional media, the gala guests were rocking the social networks. Twitter hashtag #NMA11 was the most popular trending topic in the city of Toronto between 6pm and midnight, which is really a testament to how adept magaziners are at thumbing tweets while simultaneously carrying on three or four completely independent self-referential conversations.

In truth, far from being a total schmooze-fest, it was really a classy affair. And it always warms this ol' heart to witness the post-ceremony love-in that is all people without envelopes congratulating all the people with envelopes, not with a smarmy one-liner recycled from some copy-writers' pub crawl, but with genuine cover-worthy affection.

Sure, I wandered into one late-night conversation in which Freelancer X was drunkenly complimenting the pectoral fortitude of Editor Y, but this could easily be studied as a subtextual expression of the magaziner meta-narrative of "strength in collaboration", rather than as a steamy pitch for a future joint venture of a very different kind.

Oh, and there were winners too at the National Magazine Awards. Bunches of them. One of my favourite, day-after-NMA rituals is to check out the news sites and see how the various and sundry media plagiarized our press release. The Canadian Press went for the expurgated version. The Toronto Star put a bit of work into reordering the info. The Globe and Mail wrote most of their own copy, focusing principally on their own magazine. (As of this posting, Masthead and the Canadian Magazines blog had not yet posted their insightful recaps of the gala.)

Finally, the comedown from the annual NMA high is a good time to emphasize that in a media world where trends pass for news reporting, where the most common ways to grab an audience are by scooping everyone else or by being crasser than everyone else, magazines still put an emphasis on quality of content, which is what last night was all about.

Well, that and the still unknown whereabouts of the infamous chocolate fountain.

* This blog is in no way affiliated with the National Magazine Awards Foundation or any of its members.

Magazine Week in Canada

2011-06-05T21:12:00.002-04:00

What's better than a warm spring afternoon in the park? How about a warm spring afternoon in the park with a large stack of magazines that has been quietly, patiently yet doubtless eagerly awaiting my return from India.

And what beats the heck out of that? Having a [part-time*] job that encourages one to spend his afternoon in the park reading a large stack of magazines.

It's Magazine Week in Toronto, where if last week's optimism-infused launch party for cultural affairs pub Eighteen Bridges and perfectly unassuming 45th anniversary soiree for indie icon THIS Magazine haven't completely exhausted local magazine lovers, surely the upcoming Kenneth R. Wilson Awards (June 7), MagNet Conference (June 7-10) and 34th annual National Magazine Awards (June 10) have all the makers and takers of Canadian rags (and itinerant party crashers alike) drooling for more.

The KRWs, for those of you who just said 'Huh?', are doled out to the best in b2b magazine publishing in Canada. This is where you find out if "Diamond Market Sparkles after Rough Ride" from Diamonds in Canada magazine wins the award for Best News Coverage, or "New Interest in Maggot Therapy" from Canadian Medical Association Journal is feted in the category Best Professional Article.

(These are actual titles. Other all-dressed wordplays at this year's KRWs: "Checking out the Check-ins (Marketing magazine)"; "Carbon Reins" (Alberta Oil); "The Inn Crowd" (Hotelier); and my personal favourite, "The Alpha Log" (Today's Trucking).)

MagNet is Canada's premier magazines conference, being held this year at the Marriott Courtyard. Alluring seminar titles include The Yahoo! Guide to Effective Web Writing, Dismantling the Print-Digital Divide, Web Analytics for Magazines (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet), and Get Serious about Social Networks. (Yes, we're sensing a meme here.)

The NMAs need no introduction, only further debate as to whether the puns in the Fashion & Beauty category ("The Unwearable Lightness of Being", "To the Manor Worn", etc) deserve their own category. And the three finalists for Magazine of the Year all seem like underdogs you'd root for in the park; all three made my stack to read in the sun today.

Excitement is in the air. Get. Some. Magazines.

* Full disclosure: I work part-time for the NMAs and KRWs, so really this post has been 40%--a majority government, if you will--propaganda, and 60%--a near-powerless minority of lefty parties--pure unaffiliated love. This blog is, to be sure, in no way affiliated with any of the above organizations.

Farewell India

2011-03-24T02:53:00.006-04:00

So long, India. It's been real. (Sometimes a little too real, like that time you sent your monkey scout into our bedroom.)

We enjoyed your food. Sure, it's oilier than a walrus reunion. And yes, once in a while we took your food and turned it into our food or at least into Middle Eastern food, which was a half-step toward home. But nobody complained about the Tiffins. And I love what you do with eggs.

And you were a great teacher. I arrived knowing lakhs and crores of nothing. You tried to teach me cricket. Didn't take, but nice try. You imbued me with the zen of a world without toilet paper, and now I'm your ardent disciple. You coaxed me through the motions of the wiggle-wobble-bobble-waggle, and although I thought you were a pain in the neck, you didn't give up on me.

Sure, there were some scary moments: First ride in an auto-rickshaw; first encounter with Colossus the Ox; my near-overdose on pork in Ghorkaland.

But mostly we laughed. Okay I laughed, but I'm sure you got the joke. Like all those times you told me how much you regretted that my train was late. C'mon, did you really regret that? Or that time you tried to convince me it was cold enough to wear a tuque. Nice try, but you don't know jackfruit about winter.

But speaking sincerely now, there are a few things I will miss about you, such as:

#5: Roommates who make it their livelihood to eat flying insects, including but not limited to this frog. Hats off to you, sir. You are to aerial bugs what I am to terrestrial bowls of potato curry.

#4: How remarkably easy it is to get my picture in the paper. (Especially easy if I sit in front of a banner.)

#3: Helpful signs regarding where to pee (and the adorable Oriya script)

#2: The feral taste of local milk. Don't know how I'll go back to drinking that ice-cold, sanitized, homogenized, flavourless stuff back home. (Oh look, they're milking the buffalo; it must be tea time.)

#1: Hearing my coworkers pronounce ‘Google’ as ‘Googley.’ I’ve heard it two thousand times and it still makes me giggle.

And that's what I'll miss most about you India: You quickly became a familiar place, gentle and warm, friendly and tasty. And you were always, always, just a little bit Googley.

Shrine of the Holy Mother in Dantolingi

2011-03-20T11:09:00.003-04:00

In Dantolingi in northern Ganjam district, near the border of Kandhamal, stands a hilltop shrine to the Holy Mother Mary. Legend has it that an elderly Hindu woman was returning home over the hill with a load of firewood, when she became ill and faint. The Virgin Mary appeared to her in a vision and led her to a spring which had never flowed before. The woman drank and regained her strength. The Roman Catholic Church investigated the miracle and consecrated the site of the spring. Each year since, on February 11, thousands of Christian pilgrims visit Dantolingi and climb the hill to pray at the shrine and wash in the spring, which is believed to have remedial powers.

Click here to view the full photo gallery

Tibetan Monastery of Chandragiri

2011-03-09T01:42:00.036-05:00

In 1963, about 600 Tibetan refugees arrived in the southwestern Orissa hill country of Gajapati district, in a fertile valley known as Chandragiri. It seems an unlikely spot to run into Tibetans, what with our being a long thousand kilometres from Tibet, as the kingfisher flies.

Click here to view the full photo gallery.

Those first refugees arrived here in the early 1960s after fleeing into exile with the Dalai Lama, following the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959. The Indian government resettlement program for refugees established a number of camps around India; today the refugees number between 110,000 and 120,000 all over the country.

Tibetan refugees in India—even those born here—do not have Indian citizenship; some have residence permits which must be renewed yearly, while others—especially those who arrived in a second wave in 1979—have only identity cards which restrict their movement and other freedoms.

Other than schools and handouts of farmland, which have been provided in most camps, the Indian government offers few concessions to the refugees, whose communities mostly rely on disbursements from the Dalai Lama’s Government-in-Exile and His Holiness’s global network of sympathizers.

In a lot of places, all that might seem like a hopeless situation for refugees. In Chandragiri, already in one of the poorest districts in all of India, these communities seem comparatively well off.

Now numbering about 4000 in 5 “camps”—collectively known as Phuntsokling ("land of happiness and plenty")—that look more like suburban neighbourhoods (in relative terms), the Tibetan refugees of Chandragiri seem to have made the most of what little opportunities they have.

Their homes and alleyways are spotless; roads are paved better here than anywhere for hundreds of kilometres. They raise livestock and grow maize for export beyond the community, and one local cooperative grows plantations of mangos for a juice factory. Illiteracy, malnutrition and other indicators of systemic poverty are lower here than in the rest of Gajapti district.

In fact, one international donor NGO that PREM works with recently pulled the plug on their ten-year development program in Phuntsokling; the community was “too developed.”

This monastery, the jewel of the community, was built in 2009 with money donated from around the world, and inaugurated by the Dalai Lama himself. It houses more than 200 monks of all ages. And yes, they will be glad to offer you some Tibetan tea.

Click here to view the full photo gallery.

Monkey High Jump

2011-03-08T00:01:00.003-05:00

Actually more like a not-so-high jump. Scene from our balcony, Berhampur, Orissa, India.

What PREM Does: Rehabilitation of Post-Violence Kandhamal

2011-03-06T02:35:00.006-05:00

This is the fifth in a series of posts about the development work of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) in the state of Orissa, India.

On December 24, 2007 a controversial Hindu monk named Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati was detained and beaten by a group of Christians on a rural road in Kandhamal district, Orissa. The Swami had gained infamy in the area for preaching to convert (or reconvert) tribal Christians to Hinduism. Later that day, Hindu supporters of the Swami attacked and vandalized Christian homes in the nearby village of Baminugam. Violence spread over the next week as mobs of Hindus and Christians attacked and burnt each other’s homes and shops, leaving several dead.

The following summer, the supporters of Swami Lakshmanananda gathered at his ashram to celebrate Janmashtami—the festival for the birthday of Lord Krishna. On August 23, 2008, at least 30 men armed with AK-47s broke into the ashram and killed the octogenarian Swami and four of his followers, including a small boy.

Local police and state security officials quickly blamed the attack on Naxalites—Maoist insurgents—known to be in the area and the only group likely to be so well armed for such an attack. But Hindu nationalist politicians in Orissa moved swiftly to place blame on Christians and their political leaders in Kandhamal.

On August 25, a mob of the Swami’s supporters, urged by right-wing politicians, went on a rampage in Christian villages, burning, looting, killing and allegedly raping; in four days at least 38 people were killed and at least 12,000 people from 300 villages had fled their homes, eventually forming refugee camps. Christian homes, churches and organizations were also attacked in other parts of the state. Some reports say as many as 50,000 were forced to flee.

By early September, the violence had abated, while the top Maoist leader in the region had sent a press release taking credit for the attack on Swami Lakshmanananda. But in an area barely larger than Prince Edward Island, where more than 90% of the 650,000 people live in one of 2500 rural forest or hilltop villages, Kandhamal was still a locus of fear, mistrust and misinformation.

PREM’s Involvement

Alongside local people’s organizations and other NGOs, PREM staff and volunteers went to the communities affected by the Kandhamal violence to study how to develop a framework for rehabilitation. They held consultations with many different demographic groups—Hindus and Christians, upper castes and Dalits, tribals and non-tribals—and then began hosting seminars, workshops and other platforms for dialogue, involving multiple groups from the same community and neighbouing communities. They facilitated local, national and international efforts to mobilize resources for rebuilding homes and buildings. They organized campaigns and rallies for peace, with booklets and painted signs in different villages promoting tolerance and harmony. And they utilized local traditions—song, dance and spoken-word performance—as key elements of all interventions, emphasizing unity.

As an added innovation, PREM has developed Participatory Poverty Assessment interventions by which entire communities work together to evaluate the levels and types of poverty they face—education, health, income, food security, land ownership and use, discrimination, etc—in order to build a unified framework for addressing poverty across all demographics.

After such a tragic event whose wounds were inflicted deeply and brutally, the results of rehabilitation are difficult to appraise; especially while there are still hundreds of court cases pending involving those alleged to have attacked, looted, burnt, raped, destroyed and murdered. Parts of Kandhamal are still tense, and lines of socio-political division that have existed for centuries are unlikely to be erased even after such a gut-wrenching, soul-searching calamity.

PREM’s belief is that through building unity through communal action against poverty, the best hope is a shared hope.

Photo credits:

Burning Church: Outlook magazine

Destroyed Home: The Hindu newspaper

Refugee Camp: NDTV online

Demonstration of Christians: NowPublic Media

Friday Night = Egg Roll Night

2011-03-04T01:18:00.002-05:00

Ah, the Calcutta Egg Roll stall in Annapurna Market, Berhampur. They serve up a one-egg omelette, wrapped in a chapati, stuffed with chicken masala, onion, chilli sauce and another kind of chilli sauce. Garnished with lime and served in a paper napkin, this ain't your ordinary Egg Roll. It's just not a Friday night out on the town without Berhampur's #1 street snack. Just twenty rupees (or about 44 cents).

Chilika Lake

2011-03-01T10:35:00.002-05:00

Chilika is the largest brackish water lake in Asia, measuring about 1000 square kilometres. The NGO I’ve been working with, PREM, supports development in 153 villages around and nearby the lake, where the population is mostly comprised of Fisher People communities whose social status is essentially equivalent to Dalit (formerly “Untouchables”).

Chilika’s unique composition is a combination of several geographical elements: siltation from the Daya River and others (more than 30 streams and rivers feed the lake) provides a nutrient-rich clay from the highlands; the catchment area is nourished by mineral-rich bedrock, coral and seashells; and the entire span of the lake essentially mud banks such that in most places the water is no deeper than 3 feet in the dry season, 10 feet during monsoon.

Chilika is renowned for prawn farming, migratory birds and dolphins. On a sweltering day just before monsoon in June, we arrived at the southern terminus of the Chilika ferry (a 1.5km, half-hour journey) just in time to see the boat depart. While waiting an hour for its return, the skies opened up with force, sending would-be passengers diving into betel-nut huts, but otherwise not interrupting the daily routine of the lake men and women.

Click here to view the full photo gallery.

Buffalo Time

2011-02-25T10:35:00.000-05:00

In Mandiapalli village, almost any time is buffalo time. You can set your watch—as much as you’d need to around here—to the events in the daily routine of Bubalus bubalis, the Indian domestic water buffalo: an animal responsible for most of livelihood around this village in southwestern Orissa.

At dawn, they’re on the move, herds as small as ten or as large as thirty, heading for pastures of dried paddy-field hay or fresh green grass. Late morning, their single-file parade moves from the heat of the field to the damp coolness of the wallow; a shady stretch of mud perhaps, or even a pond.

There are two kinds of animals in this world: those who wallow, and those who don’t. We who don’t might not know what we’re missing, until we see a herd of buffalo wallowing.

Afterwards, it is buffalo nap time. That’s the afternoon gone. Then comes the magic hour before sunset, when the herds are on the move again, crossing roads, blocking rush-hour traffic, moving with all the urgency and purpose of Grateful Dead concert.

The other day I was riding on the back of a motorbike through a herd of buffalo as they crossed a narrow road en masse at a lazy twenty-degree angle. Imagine a game of Frogger, only the obstacles have horns and large, bony asses. We maneuvered between tail and nose in a prize-worthy attempt, and just barely emerged on the other side of buffalo stink in time to reach a nearby tea stall.

People around here love the buffalo for its superiority to cattle and oxen for ploughing paddy fields. Hides are sold for leather. Chiseled bones and horns become decorative jewellery and amulets. Dung makes excellent cheap fuel and fertilizer. But most beloved of the buffalo’s attributes is the healthily high fat content of its milk.

Yes, even tea time is buffalo time.

The National Egg Co-ordination Committee

2011-02-17T01:03:00.041-05:00

It all started about a year ago when my friend and I went up to work on his motorcycle, when I first noticed—off the side of a side road, about a half-mile from the railroad tracks in fact—a peculiar building. And this building, wouldn’t you know, had a chain across its entrance and a sign over top that read “National Egg Co-ordination Committee.”

Well I had never heard of a National Egg Co-ordination Committee before, so with a gleam in my eye, I rode off into the sunset in search of someone who could explain what it was.*

Turns out that none of my colleagues at the NGO I work with—almost all of whom pass this derelict building on the way to the office in a jungle village—knows what goes on at NECC. But they must have thought about it before, because when it piqued my interest, it was an opportunity for all of the jokes to come out of the bag.

One person said it was a government agency, set up within the bloated bureaucracy to count and tax the passage of eggs along the adjacent highway.

Another claimed it was a front for the mafia; albeit—I added—a front at which other mafia would, no doubt, derisively snicker.

Egg Pakoda: Can't get this at Alice's Restaurant

Still a third person cracked wise that NECC exists to maintain the balance between omelettes and pakodas (well that's a hard-boiled egg, rolled in spicy, glowing-orange batter and deep fried), two opposing methods of egg preparation endemic to the local cuisine.

But the most resilient refrain for explicating the National Egg Co-ordination Committee is that, well, it must be an NGO—Non-Governmental Organization, that is—engaged in the work of taking grassroots egg coordination among the poor and marginalized people to the national level.

Presumably, this very minute, the coordination of eggs on a national scale is being done by a committee whose success at the village, block, district and state levels has been proved beyond question. With S.M.A.R.T. objectives, systematic Monitoring & Evaluation and a full-proof plan for Sustainability, the international donors have been boiling with optimism, scrambling to fund this innovative project; over-easy—you might say—in the yoke of their, um… souls.**

Yes, whether poached, sunny-side-up, or Benedictine, egg coordination is going national in India. Next up, the world.

Delicious organization

Remember, one egg is, well, just an egg. But three eggs, why three eggs is an organization. And fifty eggs, can you imagine fifty eggs all getting together for change? Friends that would be a movement.

And that’s what we have here: The National Egg Co-ordination Committee anti-uncoordination movement. And after all, that’s what development is really all about.

* With all due credit to Arlo.

**The author of this blog has just been whacked by the pun mafia.

Brown Bread in Berhampur

2011-02-14T08:30:00.001-05:00

The Saora Tribe of Gajapati

2011-02-10T05:03:00.000-05:00

The Saora are one of the oldest and most numerous of the 62 scheduled tribes of Orissa in southeastern India. The so-called Hill Saoras reside mainly in the remote district of Gajapati as well as neighbouring Ganjam and Koraput in the hilly region of the Eastern Ghats, near the border with Andhra Pradesh.

It is believed that the name 'Saora' derives from 'Sawari' (also found as 'Seori'), an elderly woman who gave refuge to Rama during his journeys in the Hindu epic Ramayana.1

Their exact numbers are not known but it has been estimated that the population of Hill Saoras is approximately 300,000 in all areas. Relatively unique among Orissa tribes the Hill Saoras maintain a casteless society; this independent of the fact that over the past few generations a large minority of them have converted to Christianity (Baptist or Roman Catholic). Others practice a traditional though unorthodox fusion of Hinduism and tribal spiritual beliefs (often characterized as ‘animism’).

These Saoras maintain permanent settlements in pastoral villages surrounded by steep hills which are terraced for paddy and vegetable cultivation. They supplement their food supply with forest-produce gathering. Their social culture, far from being primitive (a term often ascribed—wrongly—to Orissa’s tribes), is remarkable for its sophisticated governance, communalism and gender equality.

Many Saoras in Gajapati district are now engaged in employments schemes such as NREGS and OREGS2, and often entire villages work together quarrying rocks, building roads and check dams, setting up community centres and clearing land for new cultivation. Many groups, especially women, engage in micro-finance livelihood initiatives by local NGOs.

Despite these developments, the Saora remain under the omnipresent threats of soil erosion and desertification, corruption, extreme poverty, lack of access to education and health care, forced migration, and nearly futile battles with government and the mining industry over land use and rights.

These photographs were taken over the course of several visits in 2010 to Saora communities in Mohana, Chandragiri, Tabme Gorjang and Gumma.

Click here to view the full photo gallery

1-Verrier Elwin, Tribal Myths of Orissa (vol. 1), 1954
2-National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and Orissa Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme

Himalaya Redux

2011-01-28T22:08:00.001-05:00

Khangchedzonga (8598m; 28,200ft), south face from Thangsing valley, 12 Oct 2010.
To view full photo gallery click here.

What's in Your Tiffin? [a.k.a. A Week's Worth of Lunch]

2011-01-23T03:44:00.002-05:00

Lunch time is tiffin time--the lovable, stackable, put-it-on-your-headable lunch pail of India. Everyday at work around two it's waiting for me in the canteen. PREM's kitchen staff keeps me well fed, sometimes a little too well. Here's a pretty typical week.

Monday:

Roti, rice, potato-garbanzo curry, mixed-veg curry, dhal, cabbage curry, omelette.

Tuesday:

Roti, fish curry, rice, aubergine curry, fried green beans & potatoes, dhal.

Wednesday:

Roti, rice, onion omelette, fried beans & potatoes, bitter gourd & potato curry.

Thursday:

Potato-aubergine curry, green bean curry, dhal, rice, omelette, roti.

Friday:

Roti, tomato-gourd curry, omelette, dhal, green beans, rice.

Saturday:

Peanut butter! By the spoonful. A man doesn't live by curry alone.

Sunday:

Out on the street for some mutton kebabs. Tomorrow is another tiffin.

Education Programme of PREM at a Glance (VIDEO)

2011-01-14T10:54:00.003-05:00

Part 1 (above) and Part 2 (below)

Behind the Scenes:

This two-part film highlights three of the education programmes--Primary & Secondary School Hostels for children from remote areas; Child-Based Community Development (CBCD) preschools; Vocational Training for Youth--of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) in Orissa, India.

The DVD film, the first for PREM, was produced to send to current and potential donors as well as partners.

Resources were limited to a single camera without an external microphone, and a trial version of a do-it-yourself editing software. And we were up against a tight deadline: we had a two-week window before an important potential donor would be visiting to discuss entering into a long-term funding agreement on initiatives like the ones we’d be filming.

We had two weeks to shoot at a half dozen different locations in three districts of Orissa, plus interviews at PREM’s campus headquarters.

Although my colleagues enjoyed touting me, sincerely, as the director, my role wasn’t to make the film so much as to get them to make the film. In that regard I fought the urge to take over any creative control to make production a collective effort.

Location filming took place at 4 different CBCD centres in Kandhamal district 3 hours north of PREM’s facility in Mandiapalli; then at 2 different vocational institutes in Puri, across Chilika Lake to the northeast; and finally at a pair of youth hostels in Mandiapalli just outside of Berhampur.

On-camera interviews were shot over two days at PREM, with a day off in between when most people couldn’t get to work because of an unbelievable downpour that flooded the entry road into PREM’s campus, forcing us nearly to miss our deadline.

I was hesitant to write a script, preferring the interviewees to speak from the heart. But--possibly due to their uncertainties with English and their anxious debut at the sharp end of the camera lens--my colleagues requested a script. Script turned into cue cards, and well, the rest is there for posterity.

(The president--whose wooden comportment on camera is no indication of his actual personality--didn’t ask for a script, and only gave us one take’s worth of his time to get his introduction.)

In the end, it came together to the satisfaction of everyone in the organization, and seemed to be a hit at its unofficial launch.

YouTube link Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXArYof2IEU

YouTube link Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKP_Tp5sCTk

A Tuque in India

2010-12-02T22:43:00.002-05:00

Ah, December. A line of no retreat for Winter. A season of snow and slipperiness. A time for Tuques. In Canada, anyway.

Your humble Tuque Souq blogger left Canada nine months ago for India with a twosome of tuques in tow; since then Tuque No. 2 has enjoyed hibernation in a desk drawer wrapped around a camera lens.

Tuque No. 1 had the mildew--omnipresent here in the sauna that is the state of Orissa--washed out of it in September to make the journey north to Himalaya in Sikkim, on a trek up to Goecha La, at the base of Khangchendzonga--"Mountain of the Five Fingers of Snow"--the world's third highest peak.

Khangchendzonga: 8600m (28,000ft) friend of the Tuque

Aside from these adventures, the mighty tuque seems to have little utility in India.

But at long last, Winter has arrived in the coastal jungles of Orissa. It's a nose-numbing 21 degrees Celsius (74F) in the frosty moonlight. At night, now, we sleep with only one fan blowing directly on us. In the dry chill of the early morning we must don t-shirts to survive. One of these days we may get desperate enough to wear socks.

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

Indeed, here in this vale of shiveriness, even our friends and neighbours are wary of Winter's unmerciful blitz. A land that previously we considered--back in the days of 44 degrees C--to be infertile ground for anything fleece or woolen, is in fact coming to life with ripe tuques!

Well, at least one!

So You've Decided to Start a Newsletter, eh?

2010-11-22T00:49:00.002-05:00

The NGO I volunteer with—PREM—decided it wanted to start a newsletter because, well, NGOs have newsletters, but this one did not.

I was put in charge of the newsletter, or more accurately I was given the task of coordinating and guiding an Editing Team in the planning, design and execution of a monthly—er, better make that bi-monthly—newsletter, called PREM E-News.

An editing team of three, myself included, was formed. It became clear early on that one member, the self-professed IT Advisor to the Editing Team, wanted his role to be limited to technical things, and so put himself in charge of converting the .doc version of the newsletter into a .pdf approximately every 60 days.

Thus the Editing Team became two, me and the person who—rare among the staff here—has little work to do because she has no seniority. In the newsletter, hopefully she'll find her organizational domain.

We started with a planning meeting examining several existing newsletters out there in the NGO, for ideas of style and structure. Then we held an editorial meeting about what content we needed for the inaugural issue; basically, what did PREM do in the last two months?

Then we commenced a sort of journalistic training workshop—yep, still just the two of us on the Editing Team—to obtain the content for the newsletter. A lot of people at PREM don’t really know exactly what a lot of other people at PREM do on a daily basis, for reasons that are not terribly relevant right now.

But suffice to say, the E-News Editing Team made the rounds to each program manager, project coordinator and senior staff in the head office to find out what they’ve been doing lately, what activities have been implemented in their milieu, what reports they’ve written for what funding agencies, who did what, when, where, why and definitely how; not to mention show me the photos.

Slowly the newsletter took shape. On the first issue I did just about everything. But as we’ve now rolled out three issues, my partner on the Editing Team gradually has become the reporter, photographer, layout designer, photo editor, and quote-of-the-month go-getter. Whereas I hold only the roles of copy editor, deadline maker (and re-maker), and ghostwriter of the President’s Message.

The newsletter is actually a pretty big success around the office, even if our mailing list is currently only a handful of names long: staff members, funding partners, former volunteers, and my mom (thanks mom!).

For the first time in its 26-year history, PREM has a systematic, textual form of organizational memory. And all it took was a committed team, a journalistic approach, and a guy who makes a .pdf every two months.

Now you can read what all the fuss is about:

PREM E-News, Volume 1, May-June 2010 [PDF]

PREM E-News, Volume 2, July-August 2010 [PDF]

PREM E-News, Volume 3, September-October 2010 [PDF]

(See me on page four)

What PREM Does: Fighting Corruption

2010-11-16T00:02:00.002-05:00

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the development work of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) Orissa, India.

Opportunity Knocks

A Block Development Official (BDO) sits a table in his office in town. On his desk is a handwritten roster of about 1700 names of people in the 250 or so villages in his block who have applied for job cards. Some of the names are fictitious. Others are friends and relatives of the BDO. And still others are real, but they are of people who've no idea what their job card entitles them to, or of people who don't even know they've applied. He writes a receipt for a tent--meant to provide shade for road-construction workers--which he never actually bought. He finishes a report that says 12km of road were completed last month; in fact it was only 2km.*

To his district-level supervisor (whose friends and family are also on the job-card roster) the BDO submits all these documents as records of public works in his jurisdiction, and finally he withdraws the corresponding funds from the government coffers. All in a day's work.

Elsewhere, an Adivasi man is still waiting for his first day of work. But on his job card, which he doesn't yet hold, there is already a fake entry showing 126 days' work. On the report submitted to the state auditor, a figure of INR 5950 (CAD $135) is listed as the wages already paid this man. He has no idea.

National Rural Corruption Guarantee?
All of this is provided for by India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005, a law that provides federally funded employment in local development for all willing workers for a minimum of 100 days per year at a minimum wage of 60 Indian Rupees (INR; equivalent to $1.25 Canadian Dollars (CAD)) per day.

It stipulates employment for all adults in poor districts through job cards which should be granted within 15 days of application; employment within 5km of one's home village; equal wages for men for women, with a minimum of 33% of job cards in any given village reserved for women; benefits such as unemployment insurance and water.**

Even in a country known for socialist rural economic policies over the first few decades of its independence, few stimulus plans ever developed by the government of India have been as progressive as NREGA. And few schemes ever dreamed up by the government of India have made corruption this easy.

There is overwhelming evidence of systematic corruption of NREGA in every state of India, but nowhere is this corruption more rampant and--due to its infamous mantle as India's poorest state--more devastating than in Orissa.

Village leaders and middlemen take advantage of illiteracy and desperation among lower-caste and tribal villagers, cooking the books and forging job cards. Workers complete a day of labour building a check dam or a gravel road, and the attendance sheet will say they worked 33 days; 32 days' worth of their wages will go somewhere else. A government auditor doesn't feel like visiting a handful of remote villages; for a bribe he'll accept a BDO's story that all job cards have been properly distributed.

A 2006-07 independent study by the Centre for Environment and Food Security (CEFS) found that of the INR 7.33 billion (CAD $165 million) invested by the federal government in the NREGA scheme in the 6 poorest districts of the state of Orissa, more than INR 5 billion (CAD $112m, or nearly 70% of all funds) were siphoned off in misappropriations and outright peculation by government officials and middlemen.***

"Activists and NGOs spreading awareness about NREGA among rural poor of the state," noted the CEFS study, "are threatened with dire consequences and many have been terrorised into silence by BDOs and other executing officials. Some local activists who accompanied the CEFS research team during survey in Tentulikhunti block in last week of May are being threatened by the government officials and contractors who have misappropriated NREGA funds."

Putting on a Corruption Clinic

PREM is among the NGOs working to combat corruption, principally by training activists and educating the rural and marginalized public to take action against this scourge.

It's not easy, not in an environment where police, government officials and other elites are hand in glove (and glove in pocket). But recently some extra help arrived.

India has a Right to Information (RTI) Act, coincidentally also passed into law in 2005. The RTI Act guarantees access to any public document within 15 days of request. Muster rolls, job cards, payment schedules and BDO reports, to name just a few related to NREGA, are all public documents accessible under RTI.****

One thing PREM has done is establish a number of regional RTI Clinics, such as the one pictured above in Rayagada district. These essentially are training centres where PREM conducts workshops on how to utilize RTI: how to file a request; how to follow up and gain the documents; where to seek legal and other aid if necessary; how to take collective action against corruption. Clinic facilitators utilize methods like group discussion, role play, lawyer visits and testimonials from victims to help instruct community members.

Even beyond the workshops, these RTI clinics are open all the time as walk-in information booths, staffed by community activits who are trained to help victims of corruption take the necessary action for justice.

To read a case study about how PREM's RTI clinics helped one tribal community bring a huge land scam to the public eye (and put the culprits behind bars), check out the July-August 2010 issue of PREM's E-News.

The photos in this post are from an NREGA-funded road-building project in Gajapati district, Orissa.

* Excerpted from a press release of an NGO in Bihar. A Block is a constituted jurisdiction of governance in India which is comprised of anywhere between 100-250 villages and at least one major town.
** Full text of NREGA 2005 [PDF]
*** The six poorest districts of Orissa are Bolangir, Nuapada, Kalahandi, Koraput, Nabarangpur and Rayagada. Read more on this study and the impact of NREGA corruption in Orissa.
**** Full text of RTI Act 2005 [PDF]

Quote-Unquote: The Primal Land [Adibhumi] by Pratibha Ray

2010-11-11T00:13:00.001-05:00

"Life in the city had taught Somra Sisa a great deal. He had seen leaders arriving to address crowds, their motorcars raising clouds of dust; he had seen the strings of red and blue electric lights, heard the croaking of loudspeakers reciting litanies of false praise, caught the whiff of meat being cooked for celebratory feasts.

"Dhangras and dhangris [young men and women] of the Lower Bonda, Kandha and Paraja tribes were conscripted to dance and sing for the entertainment of the babus [government officials]. Endless discourses on the glories of tribal culture were staged and the ranting of speakers was drowned in the thunder of applause.

"When the meetings ended the adivasi [aboriginal] youths were sent back to their villages with empty bellies. The adivasi was only an item in the list of the disadvantaged: a slogan that could be screeched to bring political glory to the leader."

--From Adibhumi [The Primal Land*], by Oriya novelist, poet, literary critic and social activist, Pratibha Ray. Ms. Ray is an unshakable voice for the rights of Adivasi ('indigenous') peoples of Orissa.

The Primal Land is a novelized ethnography of the Bonda people, a primitive tribe living deep in the forested plateau of remote Malkangiri district on Orissa's southwestern tip, where Ms. Ray did research as an anthropology student in the 1970s.

The story of the Bonda in The Primal Land is told parallel to the sundry government attempts at development and "civilizing" the tribals, which has had both comic and very tragic results. Today, the Bonda number fewer than 5000 and face possible extinction.

[Buy The Primal Land at Amazon]

* The Primal Land, by Pratibha Ray
Translated by Bikram K. Das
Hyderabad: Orient Longman Ltd, 2001
Excerpt from pp. 254-255

The Virgin Mary's Getaway Motorcycle

2010-11-02T01:51:00.013-04:00

Now that I have your attention, here are some other sites of Gangtok, hillside capital of the Indian state of Sikkim, our next stop on our holiday up north.

Fat Monkey Screams in Darjeeling

2010-10-30T02:22:00.020-04:00

Whoa!?

Yikes!

Oh, I get it.

Breakfast in Ghorkaland

2010-10-27T23:47:00.005-04:00

Greetings from Ghorkaland. Land of the Ghorkas, mountain men and women of the Himalaya, so famed for their ferocity as soldiers that the British military dubbed them a "warrior race" and conscripted as many as possible to fight their battles (even as recently as the Falkland War). Quipped one British field marshal, "If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or is a Gorkha."

And what does a warrior race eat for breakfast? Not sure; probably something like oats and blood. (Actual Ghorkhas enjoy potatoes, garbanzo curry and dumplings.)

But what does a visitor to Ghorkaland eat for breakfast, a visitor who's eaten naught but scrawny fish and sickly chicken, when any meat at all, for eight months?

Meat. (That's 3 kinds of pork on the plate above; you know, for those of you who keep score of these things.)

But I digress. Ghorkaland is the semi-autonomous, proudly quasi-independent region of northern West Bengal whose unofficial capital city is the idyllic hillstation of Darjeeling, non-quasi-official global capital of tea, where our holiday began after a 27-hour train ride and a 3-hour 4x4 jeep ride.

The tea was okay, the meat was delicious, and the views at breakfast were divine.

The Inconvenience Caused is Deeply Regretted

2010-10-25T09:03:00.000-04:00

Six words. The voice is female, vaguely sympathetic and comforting, a bit like Mary Poppins with an Indian accent; yet also robotic and decidedly curt, as though a light scolding. "The inconvenience caused is deeply regretted."

At any of India's 3467 official railway stations, dotted along the country's 64,000 kilometres of passenger track, these six prerecorded words comprise the postscript to the inevitable announcement that your train is late.

Having spent the last four weeks travelling in the north of India--Darjeeling area and Sikkim--your humble blogger has been significantly tardy in attending to this blog. It was inevitable. Please accept our vaguely sympathetic, decidedly curt, Mary-Poppins-meets-Indira-Gandhi apology:

The inconvenience caused is deeply regretted.

(Stay tuned: In the coming days, blogs galore about the trip.)

Quote-Unquote: Walt Whitman

2010-09-28T02:08:00.005-04:00

Afoot and lighthearted,
I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

--Opening lines of 'Song of the Open Road,' from the epic anthology Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman.

(Context: Committed to reciting these lines whenever I take the first step of a new adventure, I found they popped into my head as my partner and I prepare to board a train today for Darjeeling and then on to our Himalaya trekking adventure in Sikkim. Back in a few weeks.)

You say Potato, I say... Banana Pancake

2010-09-20T23:26:00.002-04:00

There's more than one way to slice fruit. You could, for example, not slice it at all. Just peel it and wrap a spongey pancake around it, and call it (tada!) banana pancake. I'd argue it more closely resembles a banana burrito, but then, what's a burrito in the land of dosa, roti and naan?

Nothing so liberates the heart from homesickness like ordering a dish you know and love, and having it served a little unlike home.

So let's add this banana burrito-pancake to the list of things I'm loving about India.

What PREM Does: Long, Long Distance Education

2010-09-17T02:38:00.006-04:00

This is the third in a series of posts about the development work of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) in Orissa, India.

The majority of the 8 million Adivasi people of Orissa live in remote, inaccessible villages situated deep in the hilly, interior forests, where a lack of communication as well as other basic facilities are stumbling blocks for development.

Government outreach in education and health care is negligible in most of these areas. Not surprisingly, Orissa’s Adivasi people continue to lag behind the rest of India on socio-economic indexes.

30% of Adivasi children will never spend even one day in primary school, and only 1 in 4 will complete the sixth grade. Half of the population is illiterate. School attendance rates and dropout rates among Adivasis in Orissa are among the worst in the country. Teacher absenteeism, government neglect, poor infrastructure, lack of consideration for tribal culture and language, and lack of awareness among Adivasi of their rights, are among the proximate causes of these problems and only exacerbate the desperate condition in which these communities live.

A few years ago, PREM partnered with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to pilot a program to reach Adivasis in some of the most remote parts of Orissa. Through this partnership, PREM helped build Village Resource Centres (VRC) in eight different rural communities, while ISRO outfitted each centre with computer and broadcasting hardware to connect each VRC via satellite to a studio in PREM's headquarters near Berhampur.

Each Monday and Friday from its studio, PREM hosts a two-hour interactive broadcast on a scheduled topic or issue that simultaneously reaches audiences in all eight VRCs. The broadcasts usually feature one of PREM's ongoing initiatives in, e.g., pre-school education, malaria prevention, youth-club development, agro-forestry livelihood, early childhood and maternal care, eco-sanitation, positive discipline, and others.

PREM's role is to help train those community representatives who will in turn be developing these inititatives in the home community. Audiences of village leaders, parents, teachers, and youth ask questions on camera in real time and can also submit queries by email before and after the broadcast.

More often than not, in PREM's studio sits a small panel of experts and program leaders, presenting to the camera and taking questions from the participants at the VRCs. But frequently these twice-weekly broadcasts feature other, livelier acts: Adivasi singers, dancers and stage performers who present the material in a culturally contextualized fashion.

The two Adivasi men in the photo are presenting a song-and-spoken-word routine on the subject of eye care and preventing eye-related diseases. This is going to have the audience on the edge of their seats!

Happy Belated Onam

2010-09-14T02:06:00.002-04:00

Onam is the one of the biggest holidays of the year in the Indian state of Kerala, which is absolutely nowhere near where I live. However, it happens that the founder and president of PREM is from Kerala, so a feast-in-exile was arranged to honour him, as honouring the founder and president of PREM is one of the most important functions of PREM!

In a salty nutshell, Onam celebrates the annual return of an ancient, beloved king of Kerala, Mahabali, who retained such favour with the gods during his life that, in his afterlife, he is permitted once a year to visit his people whom he loved and served so well.

It's also a heck of a feast, or sadya, an all-vegetarian affair in which the mighty coconut (its milk, its oil) features in just about every dish, all of which are served on a freshly cut banana leaf. Rice, cabbage, gourd, eggplant, plantain, potato, yogurt and papadam also feature prominently in the meal whose spices are savoury and muted by Indian standards. Dessert is a sweety and milky rice pudding.

Ten Things I'm Enjoying about Life in Orissa, India

2010-09-10T03:22:00.001-04:00

1. That being chased, charged or nearly head-butted by Colossus the Ox, who rules the muddy lanes of our neighbourhood, is considered a rite of passage for residence and has endeared me to several of my neighbours.

2. That it is perfectly acceptable--or even advisable--to walk into an important meeting barefoot, and further that it's quite all right to take off your shoes, walk around and stretch your toes in the middle of someone's power-point presentation.

3. That in a culture where, in many circles, vegetarians are the majority, a "non-veg" person like myself endures no discrimination.

4. That almost every time I approach the neighbourhood egg shop for my regular half-dozen-bag purchase, the guys have it all ready for me before I enter and playfully call out "six eggs," to which I echo "chuh undah" for my most-used Oriya phrase.

5. That road trips come with elephant warnings.

6. That every month when the cable guy comes to collect the bill of 175 rupees ($3.90), he inquires earnestly if everything is okay with the cable while he has me sign and date three different official forms and waits for my smile of satisfaction before he leaves.

7. That stray dogs (almost) always prefer lounging on random piles of dirt to harassing humans.

8. That after more than six months I can finally ride a motorcycle through a herd of imposing water buffalo without fear of being impaled by their foot-long horns.

9. That the guy who comes into my office everyday to announce that it's time for lunch--which by all evidence is the only English word he knows--does so with an unaffected panache that befits the delicious meal I'm about to eat.

10. That everyday when I walk home from the marketplace, a half dozen 3-5 year-old neighbourhood children run straight at me, laughing, tripping over each other in order to be the one (or two) to hold my hand and walk me to my gate.

And here's one more shot of Colossus the Ox...

What PREM Does: Networking Grassroots People's Movements

2010-08-17T02:29:00.001-04:00

This is the second in a series of posts about the development work of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) Orissa, India.

PREM is what you might call an intermediary non-governmental organization (NGO); it is less a solitary, issue-based organization than a movement that reflects the direction of hundreds of grassroots people's and community-based organizations (CBOs). The basic idea of PREM is that people build up organizations, not the other way around.

At its inception as an advocate for education of the marginalized people of Orissa, PREM didn't just build schools. It began to build up a culture of education and literacy among those--aboriginal peoples (Adivasis), lower castes (Dalits), fisherfolk, rural villagers and farmers--who hadn't been exposed to the possibilities and rights of formal education. And it lobbied those who would deny these rights--inept or corrupt government, the haves of society--to be a part of changing the prevailing social values.

And after twenty-five years of evolution as a movement toward this value-based change, PREM now nourishes hundreds of small, village-level CBOs that, e.g., operate pre-schools, train and support local teachers, provide vocational training, promote new initiatives for curriculum development, and advocate for education among constituent communities of Adivasis, Dalits and other marginalized groups.

Over the years, PREM has expanded beyond education to facilitating projects and raising awareness about issues of health care (general, immunization, HIV/AIDS, malaria, hygiene, etc), water and sanitation, livelihood, governance, child rights and child protection, disaster relief and rights implementation.

Beyond CBO-level support at the local level, PREM has organized state-level and national-level networks so that these disparate CBOs might federate themselves for strength and unity in advocacy for change. The Orissa Adivasi Manch (lit: "forum") and the National Advocacy Council for Development of Indigenous People (NAC-DIP) are state- and national-level, respectively, federations of Adivasi-development CBOs and NGOs that are facilitated by PREM. There are similar federations formed by PREM for Dalits*, for the fisherfolk**, and for women's groups.***

From a wide-angle view, PREM is situated within an immeasurably extensive web of people, organizations, development initiatives and values that--with PREM's core competencies of knowledge and resource sharing, and its capacity to bring people together for change--is continuously building itself into a stronger and stronger alliance for social justice among the Adivasi, Dalit and other marginalized people of Orissa.

--
* The Orissa Dalit Manch is a state-level forum for Dalit issues and organizations. It's national counterpart is the Alliance Network of Dalits (AND).
** The Kalinga Fisher People's Union is a state-wide union of 35,000 local fishermen and women in Orissa. The East Coast Fisher People's Forum (ECFPF) is a network of fisherpeople's unions in various Indian States.
*** In 1992 PREM founded Uktal Mahila Sanchaya Bikash (UMSB), a state-level federation of more than 2200 women's self-help groups (SHGs), most of which are small, village-based micro-credit initiatives including seed and grain banks, local arts and crafts commerce, forest-produce and agriculture collectives, etc. All receive training and other organizational support from PREM. Today UMSB has more than 32,000 women members. UMSB is also part of a national network, INFOS (Indian Network of Federations of Microfinance Self-Help Groups).

Photo: Ceremonial planting of a tree at a meeting of various tribal organizations and CBOs with PREM.

The Road to Kandhamal

2010-08-13T01:48:00.001-04:00

The road to Kandhamal leads north by northwest out of the town of Berhampur, encountering rain-swelled rice paddies almost as soon as the last tea stalls and mobile-phone-recharge shacks are left behind.

The jungle morning in monsoon season is dulled of most of its colour but refreshingly crisp.

The first villages we approach rise up over the road in the clouds of dust from the morning traffic; a small green sign announces each hamlet we pass, with the village name kindly noted in Oriya and English.

In a place called Hinjilicut we pause for breakfast at a roadside stall. A young boy slaps a dried teak leaf onto a small metal plate, and upon this he places two idli—steamed cakes of rice flour—and three puri—fried dough patties—and smothers them in a savoury potato curry. We eat with our hands, our right hands.

We drive on, and on toward Kandhamal.

Where it warrants the attention of his eager listener, my companion does not hesitate to recite the story or anecdote or latest gossip associated with the places we pass: Here is the birth village of our Chief Minister, look how nicely paved the roads are, and they have a new greenhouse cooperative project they are implementing; In that village my brother’s family runs a preschool and day-care centre for Dalits that is supported by PREM; There, that is the village of an MLA who is currently in jail for allegedly murdering a member of the mafia.

Further along we come to the massive Bhanjanagar Dam, an artificial resevoir in the Rushikulya river that regulates the flow of water downstream to towns and industries in the coastal belt. Here in this bucolic dominion of peasants and paddies it cuts a severe pose. Timelessness is a dirty word in Orissa.

We pass through the town of Sorada, a fledgling twinkle of the proverbial melting pot where, by some intersection of need and desire, the residents built all the holy houses of religion next to each other; two mosques nestle around the Catholic church, which abuts the grounds of a Hindu temple of Hanuman.

The rural road begins to rise; we are gaining elevation onto the foothills of Kandhamal. Where earlier we had followed a purposefully paved route with a dotted white line dividing its two lanes, we now follow a single unmarked lane through unmarked villages.

I protest silently: Every place should have a name. But by now there are no more signs. There is less brick and cement, more thatch and mud. Our road could be said to have lost its integrity. The cows are scrawnier. The haystacks are pathetically thin.

We are more than two hours but less than 100 kilometres from Berhampur. The villages have not ceased to pass, but few may be seen. The forest encroaches upon the road, thickening and trapping the near-midday heat.

At last we reach our point of ascent. Our frail road will climb almost fifteen hundred feet in less than three kilometres of roughly paved switchbacks. The forest is dense. Nothing stirs. Even the imagination has gone still.

When we reach the top, we will be in Kandhamal. If I am lucky, someone remarks, we might see an elephant.

I have no cause to pick a fight with my luck way out here, but no elephant appears.

View Larger Map

Photo credit: http://ncf-india.org/

What PREM Does: Child Based Community Development

2010-08-09T02:44:00.003-04:00

This is the first in a series of posts about the development work of People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) in Orissa, India.

The Adivasis are the aboriginal people of India. There are more than 8 million in the state of Orissa alone, in 62 distinct tribes each with their own language and culture. The characteristics which unite them are unfortunately the least impressive. They live mostly in remote villages, deep in the forests and high in the hilltops, where most government services, such as education, do not reach.

Since 1975, the state government of Orissa has established hundreds of what it calles Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) centres in rural, Adivasi-dominant areas of the state. These centres are supposed to be a kind of multi-purpose daycare for young children (aged 3-5), providing Early Childhood Education (i.e., pre-school), health care and immunization, playground facilities, and nutrition (i.e. a free lunch). Each centre should have a staff of one teacher and one supervisor, be open for at least 4 hours per day, 6 days per week, and be centrally located and well-known in the local area.

Unfortunately, surveys conducted over the years by PREM and other non-governmental organizations have found that these ICDS centres are operating far, far below acceptable standards. Just some of the problems associated with ICDS centres in Orissa include that:

Most ICDS centres are located on the outskirts of villages or between villages, requiring foot travel by the young children as much as one kilometre each way;
Most ICDS centres are built in relatively large hub villages, around which are clusters of smaller hamlets whose children are not able to access the centres due to distance;
Teacher absenteeism (and associated corruption, such as teachers paying bribes to supervisors) is prevalent if not widespread;
Many ICDS centres are open only a few hours per week, usually long enough for the teacher to show up, serve lunch, and go home (i.e., there is no actual pre-school at all);
The vast majority of ICDS teachers and supervisors are not from the local community, meaning they likely do not speak the local tribal language and have difficulty communicating with children, parents and community leaders;
Child abuse in the form of neglect and corporal punishment is reported.

Furthermore, NGO studies have shown that Adivasi children perform better in primary school if they begin pre-school in their mother tongue (i.e. tribal language) and are gradually transitioned to Oriya, the language of instruction they will encounter in primary school. High dropout rates and low performance by Adivasi children in primary school are attributed, in part, to lack of mother-tongue introduction to education in pre-school, and to non-attendance of pre-school. (70% of all Adivasi children will drop out of primary school within one year, due to language barriers, inaccessibility, migration, and lack of priority placed on education by the child's family/community.)

Urged by Adivasi community and people's organizations who are frustrated at the inefficacy of government development, PREM in 2007 launched its CBCD project which has, at present, constructed or renovated more than 350 new community centres in rural Adivasi villages and hamlets. PREM provides training, helps develop Adivasi-focused curricula and materials, and pays initial salary to the staff of two facilitators per centre while initiating a fund for the community members to pay the costs in the long-term. The facilitators are without exception young women from the same tribal community if not the same village. The pre-school education in the CBCD centres is conducted in three languages: Oriya, English and the mother tongue (i.e. tribal language) of the children.

Concurrently, PREM organizes workshops and seminars in the communities for parents and local leaders on child rights, education policy, child-centred health care from pre-natal through adolescense, forming village education committees and parent-teacher committees, and monitoring the implementation and quality of educational provisions.

PREM also lobbies state education officials to take its CBCD project as a model for future ICDS, arranging exposure visits and encouraging local communities to advocate for the program's continued implementation.

Though a relatively young project, it has already yielded positive results. CBCD centres are open an average of four times more per month than ICDS centres. Children who transition from CBCD centres to primary school have a lower dropout rate than children who previously attended ICDS centres or no pre-school at all.

Most importantly, the entire concept of the CBCD centres is constructed from the bottom up, with the participation of village leaders, parents and even children's clubs in every stage from building construction to teacher training to monitoring. As a result, the process is less likely to fail the needs of the children, because the entire community has taken ownership of the program to educate young tribal children.

Quote-Unquote: Ahmed Ali

2010-07-13T06:42:00.002-04:00

"In spite of griefs and sorrows a man gets used to life, for its flaws must always go on. Soon Mir Nihal resumed his normal life and became reconciled to his fate. There is no doubt that he did not go to work, nor did he fly his pigeons now. They were all of the past and were left behind. The road of life grew dim in the hazy distance, but he got ready to continue the journey all alone...

"For if it were not for Hope, men would commit suicide by the scores, and the world would remain a barren desert in which no oasis exists. On this tortuous road of life, man goes on hoping that the next turn of the road will bring him in sight of the goal. But when he takes the turn and still there is no sign of the promised land he still says that at the next turn he will come to it. Thus from turn to turn he goes on hoping, believing in the will-o'-the-wisp that is Hope. And Mir Nihal went on believing in disbelief. Days and weeks passed, as the years had flown before; and life held sway as of yore, over the empires of the world."

--Ahmed Ali, from the novel Twilight in Delhi, first and last paragraphs of Book 2, Chapter 5, pp 120 and 125.

(Context: My current leisure reading. And because, as the doldrums of monsoon season set in, one finds a melancholy comfort in the desperation of characters like poor Mir Nihal in Ahmed Ali's classic tale of interwar Delhi. On a related note, the so-called doldrums of monsoon season are exacerbated if not principally caused by this blogger's lack of a laptop computer, whose adapter short-circuited three weeks ago and has not yet been replaced; in case any reader wondered where I am.)

Oriya Literature in Translation

2010-06-22T00:23:00.000-04:00

I was introduced to Oriya literature by chance and by suffering. In a Khan Market bookshop in Delhi, I decided to spend a whopping 800 rupees on the Orissa edition of The Beautiful India reference book series.

There is a different edition for each Indian state, approximately 350 pages, written in imperfect Indian English (albeit scholarly Indian English) in the style of a mid-twentieth century social science Ph.D. dissertation. In other words, it is the kind of book that would cure insomnia in a sloth; a very, very dry reading on the history, economy, language, culture, politics, demographics, industry, art and architecture of the state. But one of the few gems was the section on Oriya literature—specifically the names and themes and significance of prominent writers, novelists and poets—that set me off on the path of local literary adventure.

Within the otherwise drab pages of that textbook I discovered the name of Umesh Chandra Sarakar, whose 1888 story Padmamali is considered the first-ever novel written in Oriya. Fakir Mohan Senapti (1843-1918) is called the father of modern Oriya prose. In the late 19th century a literary movement called Satyabadi came along, known for its Oriyan nationalistic spirit. There were satirists and romantic poets and fiercely politicized short story writers. The famous brothers Mohanty, Gopinath and Kanhu Charan, wrote now-classic stories on themes of social consciousness and cultural battles with modernity during the post-partition era of early Indian nationhood.

I desperately wanted to read these works to understand the place where I’d be spending a year or more of my life.

By further chance, I stumbled upon a glorious website called Grassroots Books India, billed as the largest website of Oriya literature in translation (though it could equally call itself the only website of Oriya literature in translation). Here to my delight I found Padmamali and many of the works of Senapti and the Mohantys and other important Oriya writers, available in English translation, for download in PDF format—absolutely FREE!

Grassroots Books, a non-profit, aims to “open doors to India’s best writing — selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers and translators — by publishing and promoting these works on the web. We also serve as an advocacy organization for literature in translation, producing events that feature the work of Oriya writers and connecting these writers to the world at large.”

NB: Fellow Orissa-based VSO volunteer Sheila Ash has written a very informative introduction to and review of some Indian and Oriya lit on her blog, Ashramblings.

The Indian Waggle

2010-06-17T04:12:00.002-04:00

It is somewhere between startling and disconcerting. When, at the initial passing of a thought beyond your lips--as soon as your utterance becomes an utterance--your interlocutor begins to shake his head at you, smiling. You have just begun to speak, and already you feel wrong: wrong place, wrong person, wrong thought?

Maybe disorienting is the better word for it. It is probably the single most jarring accoutrement of Indian culture, coming as it does between interpersonal connection.

I'm talking about the waggle. The Indian Waggle: The ubiquitous cranial (or as much cervical) gesture of assent, comprehension (feigned or real), acquiescence, politeness, and (rarely) finality.

More commonly referred to as the Indian nod, bob, bobble, wobble, or wiggle, I nevertheless prefer the term waggle, and not just because of the generous dictionary definitions:

waggle verb 1 /wag uhl/ a to wobble or shake, especially while in motion. b to move up and down or from side to side in a short, rapid manner. c to wobble and shake the head and move it up and down and side to side all at the same time in order to confuse the hell out of your interlocutor. noun 1 /wag uhl/ a the aforementioned confusing-as-hell head motion.

Where I am accustomed to a forward head-nod, a "yeah," an "uh-huh," an "mmm-hmmm," even an "okee-dokee," here in India I get the Waggle. You understand my words?; You agree with me?; You like what I'm saying?; You want me to keep talking; You think I'm the greatest thing since paneer pakora?... Then, why don't you waggle your head while I'm talking?!

How about I lose my train of thought completely as I am mesmerized by your waggle?!

All kidding aside, the Waggle is not only surprisingly endearing--insofar as it is usually accompanied by a smile--but also dynamic and (I might as well admit) infectious.

The mechanics of the Waggle may seem daunting to the first-timer. Most of the effort is in the neck, while the head is the resulting focal point of the action. Try to imagine your head bobbing smoothly from side to side, and making a three-dimensional figure-eight motion (think hard) while your shoulders remain perfectly still. Keep your eyes fixed on their subject and slowly stretch a smile across your cheeks. There, you've just lassoed the theory of the Waggle.

And though I'm far from a seasoned practitioner of the art of the Waggle, I now find its waggliness creeping into my subconscious: If I see a waggle, I waggle. Sure, it starts as a comfortable nod (as a lifetime nodder, transitioning to the waggle is a bit like trying to defeat the proverbial chewing-gum/walking routine). Then gradually it morphs--sometimes awkwardly and with a bit of strain--into the common waggle. Lately I find I can waggle without a conscious cue. I am a waggler. But don't try this at home.

--
NB: Regarding the photograph, I asked the man if I could take a snapshot of his shop. He waggled. The boy asked if he could be in the photo. I waggled.

India Book Review: Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga

2010-06-14T06:23:00.003-04:00

Duly celebrated young Indian author Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize and shot the young man to stardom. I've still not read that book. It is sitting on my virtual bookshelf, which is to say that it is stored on my partner's Kindle that I haven't yet deigned to use, which means it stands a tiny chance of achieving the paradigmatic distinction of being the first electronic book I ever read.

However, my actual non-virtual bookshelf is blessedly still full of actual non-virtual books, one of which is Adiga's second book published (but first written), Between the Assassinations, a collection of short tales ("a novel of stories") set in a fictional town of Kittur on the southwest Indian coast during the seemingly arbitrary but nevertheless poetically named era in India's history between the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the assassination of her son Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Arbitrary, because the stories follow no discernible chronological order, nor are they pegged to any specific date during that seven-year span, nor do they at any point reference either of the two assassinations as events significant to the narrative. Should any of these facts put you off reading the book, you'll be the sorer for it.

What Adiga writes in these character-driven stories of daily life in all corners, sectors, classes, religions and ages of Indian society tucked just beneath the innocent surface of fictional Kittur, is a tale of a transcendant, modern India, where the barriers, both physical and culturally imagined, between all corners, sectors, classes, religions and ages of Indian society are being torn down by the thrust of modernity, which as a character itself takes the thematic forms of, for example, a globalized economy, linguistic convergence and domination, identity politics of sub-national groups, and the better-informed but ceaselessly futile revolt of the have-nots against the haves--all of which characterize India's coming of new age in the late 1980s.

And, as the prose comprises the earliest, rawest writings of a young, talented author, Adiga's style is wonderfully sardonic, purposeful, and not at all off-key when it hits the occasional epiphanous note.

You should read this book.

Between the Assassinations
By Aravind Adiga
Free Press, 2009
339 pages

After the Catch

2010-06-12T03:42:00.001-04:00

The seaside town of Gopalpur is--as regular followers of this blog will guess--becoming a regular weekend getaway for us. Morning walks on the beach have an innate, therapeutic value not easy to define but not difficult to imagine. On a recent excursion, our morning walk took us past a fisherfolk village, not long after the men had returned from the sea with the day's catch for the market, where boats dried on the sand, crows and dogs picked over scraps, and the men and women set about repairing vessels and nets and gear in the perpetual cycle of life by the sea.

{Click here to see the full gallery of 17 photos}

Quote-Unquote: Why India is terrible at Football

2010-06-09T00:02:00.004-04:00

"Why is India such a non-entity in international football? Because, whether or not we acknowledge our inadequacies, the predominant mindset of this nation almost ensures that we are unlikely to be successful at [an] elite professional level in any sport that demands strenuous physical activity--this contention being corroborated by the fact that among the top five medal winners in the Beijing Olympics, there is not a single cricket-playing country."
--Columnist Siddhartha Mishra, writing in the June 6 edition of The New Sunday Express.

(Context: The 2010 FIFA World Cup is two days away. Mr. Mishra--who also argued that India is a non-factor in the soccer world due to underfunded local programs, overfed bureaucrats of the All India Football Federation, low wages for referees and players resulting in unspecified corruption, and lack of vision in creating a national program--is understandably downtrodden (as a patriot and a football fan in India) but hardly fair: If India is looking for youth with the physical stamina to endure a simple ninety-minute football match, come on down to hot, humid Orissa and check out the kids running around chasing balls in the dirt in my neighbourhood. Also, what kind of logic is the Beijing Olympic reference? Trinidad & Tobago were a no-show in Beijing. They play cricket with the formidable West Indies federation. And we saw wee T&T at the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany.)

The Barefoot Guide to Indian Football, aka Soccer

2010-06-07T00:24:00.001-04:00

In 1950 the newly independent country of India was invited to take part in the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. The organizers of the tournament in Brazil wanted an Asian representative for the football (aka soccer) showcase, which was being held for the first time in twelve years due to some war.

The qualifying teams of Asia--Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines--all decided against attending, citing the expense of travelling halfway around the world and the uncertain security and venue arrangements in Brazil. So FIFA president Jules Rimet called upon India to represent its continent.

There was only one catch: You have to wear shoes. India declined.

Who needs shoes? India played football at the 1948 London Olympic Games and the 1952 Helsinki Olympics barefoot. (Okay, they didn't win a single game; there is also a popular story that in Helsinki several Indian players got frostbite during a 10-1 loss to Yugoslavia.)

However, India won the gold medal in football at the 1951 Asian Games barefoot. Mohammed Salim, the first Indian ever to play club football in Europe (for Celtic of the Scottish League, in a brief stint in 1936 before he got homesick and returned to India), played barefoot all his life. Many legends of Indian football, few as they are, got their starts in barefoot leagues.

(India finally put on shoes for the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne. It advanced to the bronze-medal match, falling to Bulgaria 3-0. Alright, perhaps shoes are a good thing.)

Nevertheless, since it embraced playing in shoes, the Indian national football team has never qualified for the World Cup.

In 2010 World Cup qualifying in Asia, India was ousted in the preliminary knockout round by Lebanon, a team so mighty that after beating India it proceeded to lose all six of its group-stage games against Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Singapore (also not appearing in the World Cup this year) by the combined score of 14-3.

In the pre-tournament FIFA World Rankings, you'll find India sliding in at No. 132 out of 207 countries, one spot behind Swaziland (but also 32 spots ahead of rival Pakistan).

So as the World Cup gets underway next weekend, we'll not be seeing any of India. I've yet to discern if India will even be watching. After all, there might be a cricket match on somewhere.

--
Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/roosfotos/91313109/

The Children of the Hills and the English Conversation Club

2010-06-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

"We come from the hills, sir." This is how the children explain it to me; how they name their place, as though a simple tilt of my head up from the horizon will answer everything I need to know about them.

Perhaps it does. These children I visit everyday are adivasi--'tribals' in the local English vernacular--aboriginal inhabitants of India. And yes, they live in the hills, in the forests, in tiny village clusters and hamlets. Unassimilated, passed by, on the margins... these are the hills.

They are my children, or so it is said in the parlance of the office. ("Mister-richard, you go to see your children now?") Each afternoon at half past four, I sit with thirty-four adivasi teenagers and facilitate an English conversation class--or club, as I prefer to call it.

It is summer vacation, and the children of the hilly villages have just completed the tenth grade. They spend the school year here, in special hostels, in Mandiapalli village just outside of Berhampur in the Indian state of Orissa. In fact, they've spent most of their lives here. Their villages are less than 100km away but take at least a day to get to, by bus and then by foot, up into the hills. There are no schools there, certainly not English-medium schools. They spend ten months in school, go home for two weeks, and then come back for summer courses, such as Mister-richard's (impromptu) English Conversation Club, where we hang out and tell jokes, swap fable for local fable, and compare and contrast Canada with India on any number of topics.

About ten years ago, the organization I work with here, PREM, helped establish a model school to give adivasi children the opportunities that few of their community ever have. These fifteen-year-olds were among the inaugural class. Their illiterate parents back in the hills had the courage and foresight to sign them up when PREM visited to explain about the school. It probably wasn't easy; a lot of tribal children go to work at young ages in the family business--usually millet cultivation combined with forest-produce gathering and some handicrafts or trades--especially if their fathers are away in other parts of India as migrant labourers. Child marriage is still common, which precludes long-term education.

Today these children read, write and speak Hindi, English and Oriya, in addition to their tribal languages. They have algebra and chemistry and computer science and just what you'd expect a teenager to have in school. After classes they cook and eat with each other, maintain the hostel together, go hiking and play cricket and fly kites. They are thirty-four among three million adivasi children in Orissa alone, and they know this. They are carefree when they should be, but also driven; in class I can hear it and feel it in what we talk about. These children know what opportunity is, and what it isn't. They also speak the language of rights, of values, of justice, and of hope: university, autonomy, community, development, progress, future...

I can't have these conversations with just anyone here. Like all teachers, I am the lucky one.

Last Friday, the students were on pins and needles (an expression Mister-richard taught them). They awaited the results of the annual year-end school examinations, their final cumulative grade point for the year. In the second-floor common room of the hostel, home to the English Conversation Club, no one could concentrate on the activities or games or jokes (in fact, more than a few skipped out on the meeting altogether). To the relief of all, the hostel ward finally got the email in the late afternoon and posted the list on the tackboard outside the kitchen.

Two of my students scored over 90%, apparently a ludicrously high score around here. One of them, a girl called S., feted her success by offering sweets to her classmates, as is the tradition here. (When it's your special day, you provide the treats, not the other way around.)

The other, a short, brick-built lad called J., took the news in typical teenage stride: with a shrug of the shoulders and a cock of the head, which absolutely could not conceal his smile and beaming pride. Some of the other children queued up for the hostel phone to call their families. But J.'s family will have to wait a while to hear the news of his success. In his village in the hills, just over the horizon, there are no phone lines and no mobile phone services.

The hills may not seem so far, but J. and his classmates have come a very long way. I hope their future is as bright as their faces.

--
NB: The children in the photograph are not my English students but others I've visited. I haven't brought my camera to class yet. This photograph was taken with the children's expressed consent.

India Blog Roundup

2010-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

Enough about me, for once! There are approximately sixty VSO volunteer workers here in various parts of India, and among them are a few savvy bloggers. So I present the first in a series of India Blog Roundups, a sampling of other good stories from the lives of vols in India.

Our dear friend Isabel, a Briton living in a small village in Rajasthan, writes in her Indian Bells blog about the newsworthy yet chronically underreported issue of child marriage in India. Also she posts a recipe for mango curry, not to be missed, and a day-in-the-life-of enduring India's heat.

Our buddy Paul, an Aussie with an Enfield, and who lives in Orissa's capital Bhubaneswar, blogs about the Red Ribbon Express, a roving HIV/AIDS-awareness train on a year-plus journey around India. He also writes about his twin loves, lassi and Varanasi.

Gina and Corey, a fun couple of Americans who co-author Sustainable Dignity, blog from the western Orissa town of Koraput about booze in India, with which I have familiarity. And believe it or not a County Fair came to their little hamlet, complete with ferris wheel and the Joker!

Susie, who lives in the tiny village of Bhawanipatna in western Orissa, writes about India's 2011 census, perhaps the largest human project in history. Take some time, too, to visit the photo galleries on her site; gal's been to a few places!

And Sheila, also in Orissa and blogging at Ashramblings, has a great piece on food, including the jahni, a courgette-like veggie that looked tasty enough when we saw it at the market, but which disagrees (let's say nicely) with the mouth!

Last but not least, my partner Ashley has started a blog, Strange News from another Star, where she writes about extraordinary traffic behavior in our town of Berhampur, and also about encounters with caste.

Quote-Unquote: Aravind Adiga

2010-05-26T06:52:00.000-04:00

"Even the writer of the truth should not know the truth entirely. Every word, upon being written, is like the full moon, and daily it wanes, and then passes entirely into obscurity. That is the way of all things."
--Aravind Adiga, Between the Assassinations, 2009, p.136.

(Context: My current leisure reading. On a related note, the Quote-Unquote nook of this blog tips its hat to D.B. Scott at the Canadian Magazines blog. And with the National Magazine Awards coming up next week, this blogger misses Canadians and their magazines more than ever!)

India Book Review: Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie

2010-05-22T01:58:00.005-04:00

If my memory is to be trusted I don't recall ever in my near-thirty-four years of life in the fortunate company of some of the best people in the world any one them uttering hinting gesturing that Salman Rushdie is his-or-her favourite most-loved best writer.

Having reread what is unswervingly credited as his best novel, Midnight's Children, here in India after first pre-dieting on other, mostly non-fiction books of subcontinental history, I can without hesitation or surprise express an reborn affinity for the book and its (after considering all possible adjectives, I'll go with 'infectious') prose.

Even in spite (or because?) of Rushdie's grotesque disfigurement of international conventions on the use of the semi-colon; I willingly endured what I had previously admonished discarded vomited as knickknack illusionist storytelling combined with an ineluctable rhapsodical unquenchable urge to build my vocabulary. (I'm looking at you, The Moor's Last Sigh; Shame, you're forgiven because your imagery of Pakistani coup culture was enticingly tabloid-esque.)

What can I tell you? This time round his alluring chutnification of fictionalized autobiography with the history and wars and rulers of India really snorted me up and away into the nasal passages of the life times adventures of Saleem Sinai. No, next time you see me I won't be telling you that Rushdieji is my new bestest prose-wallah; only that the experience of reading his masterpiece while ensconced in India is unlike any other encounter with the author.

Deservingly the novel is one of the most celebrated of the 20th century; if you're spending a bunch of time (especially down-time) in India, add it to your reading list.

Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
Vintage Paperback, 1995
463 pages

Sandlot Cricket [Part 2]

2010-05-17T22:30:00.005-04:00

{Click here for Part 1}

The bowler uncorked the ball. In one instant I held dominion over all eyes, even (perhaps I exaggerate) those of the itinerant cows who come by the sandlot in the evening to graze.

I, cricket-batsman, wicket-protector, first-overall-draft-choice, swung.

Thwack!! Contact!

(Later in the evening, in the afterglow of a new experience which, like the sunset, is susceptible to abstraction, I reflected that upon the exact moment in which bat met ball, the sandlot became a microcosm of my entire state of being in India: cows, stray dogs, strewn garbage, honking horns, passing trains, oppressive heat, the curious and almost entranced eyes of onlookers; and I in the middle of it all, willing myself somehow to feel a natural part of it...)

But getting back to the actual point where the ball left my bat, it was a beautiful parabola in slow motion; the ball arched gracefully high above the field and returned to Earth with no less grace, caught effortlessly, barehanded, by a ten-year-old boy.

In baseball terms it was a pop-fly to the second baseman. The humiliating infield-fly rule would have been invoked; an easy out.

I turned around and shrugged knowingly at my teammates, while behind me the young lad who'd caught my meagre effort joyously jumped around holding the ball like the IPL trophy.

As it happened, my quick out boded ill for the rest of my team. Even with a back-to-back pair of fours by Sunil in the ninth over, at the end of our innings we'd put nineteen runs on the imaginary scoreboard. This was, I quickly learned, so dismal an effort that the team briefly considered conceding and begging a restart.

Roles swapped, my team took the field (does one 'take' the field in cricket?) and positioned me quite shallow to the right of the bowler, a position which, though I don't know its name, is by all evidence a critical one, and a busy one.

Off the bats of the opposing team's boys the ball careened in my direction again and again, skipping off the pitch with eye-popping zigs and zags as it changed direction with each pebble or tuft of grass or divot of dirt or morsel of rubbish that it felt along the way.

(I fared better when the ball came at me without touching the ground; not only was this a clean-and-simple out; not only did my act of catching even the most routine of fly balls endear me to my teammates; but making this play obviated the need for immediate subsequent brainwork.)

In the game of cricket, once the novice fielder, having corralled a hop-skip-and-jumping ground ball into his hands, raises his eyes to field level, he witnesses a scene of incomprehensible disarray: the man with the bat is running toward him; but wait, another man with a bat is running away from him!

Swift little feet--my teammates'--kick up dust as they move their bodies into new locations: beside wickets, behind wickets, in front of wickets, between wickets. Everyone is running, everyone is shouting, everyone is waving arms... everyone wants the ball, or at least wants me to release it!

Madness, I report from the field.

India seemed so orderly when I held the bat. Sure, I was the centre of countless wondering attentions, but the world was still; a man had his moment of clarity.

But when I hold the ball, India is utter chaos, a sandlot of rising dust and eye-blurring perpetual motion.

What does one do in this situation? One fixes his eyes on something, on any one thing, and moves toward it before he is run over by the uncontrollable mayhem. And so I underhanded the ball to the nearest standing-next-to-the-wickets teammate (doubtless he has an official title) who in a continuous motion redirected the ball into said wickets and made (wow!) an out.

But I digress. Lest I paint a distorted image of my team's stalwart defensive stand thanks to my sure-handed fielding, the opposing team in fact thrashed us.

I did have a chance to bowl an over: six balls thrown on target, mercifully only two of which were sent screaming over my and everyone's heads for a six. (A home run, as it were; and what happens to a baseball pitcher who surrenders two home runs in one inning? Again I digress).

In the end we lost by something like three runs with two overs and four wickets to spare (or they had them to spare; I'm not sure). That, in sandlot cricket, is a blowout.

Strangely, as this unfamiliar game ended, so did something completely familiar: English. I'd barely noticed it at the time, but for quite a lot of these children it seems the breadth of their vocabulary in my native language is comprised mainly of cricket calls: Good out, wide ball, good catch, no ball, single, double, four, six, over...

Over the course of this game so incomprehensible to me, we had (I say at the risk of my metaphor-cup finally running over) actually been speaking my language all along.

So until we meet again, sandlot, danyavad and suba ratri, thank you and goodnight.

The Sandlot at dusk

(Click all photos to enlarge)

Sandlot Cricket [Part 1]

2010-05-11T09:29:00.001-04:00

As a matter of inevitable fact, it was as certain as curry. It was as likely to happen as my stepping in cow dung while crossing the street. Sooner or later in India, it was fate that I'd become intimate with the sport of Cricket.

If only I could report that, once played, the vagaries of this insoluble game are now clear to me.

Each afternoon when the clouds and wind come by to mitigate the dreadful heat, the boys of summer--wickets and bats in hand--emerge from the innumerable nooks of the neighbourhood and descend upon the vacant field immediately next to our home.

There are about twenty-five of them, aged between nine and sixteen. Some I know by their proper names--Sunil, Puna, Gopinath, Rav--and some I know only by now-familiar faces, the ones who smile and wave and shout out "haalloo, meester reechard" every time I enter or exit our shared dirt road.

And others, I am learning, have only nicknames in the company of their mates; those few who know a bit of English dutifully translate them for me. There is Black-Boy, whose skin is darker; Fat-Boy, a rotund lad; Tooth-Boy, whose upper teeth are gapped and bend outward from his mouth; and the mysteriously nicknamed President, whose special executive authority is not yet clear to me.

Their game is sandlot cricket of no regular shape or form. I've invited myself to watch on several occasions, and been so well received as to unintentionally interrupt the game with my presence. They've practically demanded, on occasion, that I take a few practice swings, even while their game is in full flow.

But on this day, I arrive early enough to be chosen for a side; actually to play the game of cricket.

Those that know the game well please bear with me, for though I've lived a long, sporty life up to now, I've never been able to distinguish this particular sport's head from its tail. (By all means, hold me solely responsible for inaccuracies in my usage of technical terminology and my interpretations of events.)

Our sandlot cricket is, perhaps intrinsically, unorthodox. To speed up the match (so that several may be played subsequently), we are limited to ten overs and one innings per side, perhaps a variation of Twenty20 Cricket, of which there is a dizzyingly popular professional league here in India.

In plainspeak, if indeed I've understood the rudiments of the game, each of the ten-or-so players on one side has one turn at the bat, then the other side has an identical go, and whichever team has scored the most runs therein is declared the winner.

In proper sandlot form, two boys are designated captains, and they in alternation select their teams from the gathered lot until all belong to one side or the other. A flip of a bat, heads or tails, determines the picking order, and the team of the second captain receives the advantage, perhaps, of batting second.

For my inaugural game, it seems the universal logic of choosing players in an order based upon their proven ability to perform is elided; I am not chosen by so much as bestowed upon the first captain, and so advantageous--or auspicious--is my presence on the first team deemed to be that, as compensation, the second captain is allowed to pick the next two players.

Thus to me, the supposed honour of my mere presence is such that its immediate and only tangible effect is to handicap my own team by ensuring that the actual two best players are chosen for the other!

And indeed is that misbegotten honour extended when my team insists that I bat first. The game is underway when I step into the crease and stare down the bowler with my roughest-toughest, if wholly contrived, cricket face.

{To be continued...}

The Sandlot
(Click all photos to enlarge)

Tikka Tacos

2010-05-09T01:55:00.055-04:00

Sunday morning breakfast treat.

Tikka sauce (from the low-fat Indian cookbook):
1.5 tbsp each of ground coriander and cumin
1 tbsp each of garam masala and dried mint
1 tsp chilli powder (double it for real fire)
1/2 tsp each turmeric and salt
2 tbsp each garlic paste and ginger root paste (i.e. pureed in mixer, or minced if you ain't got a mixer)
1 cup water
2/3 cup vegetable (e.g. sunflower) oil

Mix dry spices with water to form a thin paste. Heat oil in a skillet or wok. Stir-fry the spice paste for 5-7 minutes until the water is mostly absorbed. Stir in garlic and ginger for another 2-3 minutes. Set aside.

Breakfast:
Prepare your potatoes (1kg) however you like 'em. I wash and chop them, leaving the peel on, and pre-boil them 10-15 minutes (until just tender when forked) so they'll cook faster in the skillet. Drain and set aside.

In a large skillet or wok on medium heat, fry 1 cup chopped onion in 2 tbsp oil till golden. Add 1 cup peeled and chopped tomatoes. Stir in tikka sauce, then potatoes. Simmer covered 10-15 minutes, or longer on lower heat. Meanwhile, scramble all the eggs you can take with this massive feast.

At this point, you should already have your rotis made and ready, assuming of course you can't find tortillas. Prepare your tacos with tikka potatoes, eggs, and of course, the unimpeachable Lall's green chilli sauce.

Optional: Add bacon. Lots and lots of bacon. (Sigh.)

India Book Review: Inhaling the Mahatma, by Christopher Kremmer

2010-05-06T07:09:00.001-04:00

Nearly fifty years after the assassination of the Mahatma Gandhi, a copper urn containing part of his ashes--which were supposed to have been emptied into the Bay of Bengal in 1948--was found in a bank vault in the Oriyan city of Cuttack. Gandhi's great-grandson Tushar Gandhi won a custody battle for his ancestor's remains, and brought the urn to Allahabad--the city built at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers--for a scattering ceremony.

Aussie journo Christopher Kremmer, a foreign correspondent from Sydney, attended the ceremony and found himself a prime vantage point for photography as Tushar, standing in the Ganges River, opened the urn to release the cloud of ashes. Wrote Kremmer:

"Clicking away with my camera, I didn't realise that the amorphous cloud was creeping close to me, pushed along by wayward zephyrs. The first thing I noticed was a strange, metallic taste in my mouth. Then, a peppery sensation infiltrated my nose, like that preceding a sneeze. Suddenly, shockingly, I realised that I was inhaling the Mahatma."

Kremmer covered Indian news for international media for much of the period between 1991-2004, and collected his professional memoirs in this excellent travelogue.

India's slow emergence, after the Cold War, as a burgeoning global power buoyed by a shift toward free-market capitalism and privatization parallels the latent development of contemporary identity politics in a country whose people and regions are almost as diverse as they are numerous. And Kremmer saw and wrote about much of it, from the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 to the Gujurat riots of 2002.

In addition to inhaling the Mahatma, Kremmer was also caught smack in the middle of the Ayodhya affair--the destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu fundamentalists--perhaps the single most illustrative event of the new Indian era.

Along the way, Kremmer explored the softer sides of Hindu political, historical and cultural identity, in ashrams and ancient temples; he also married an Indian woman and established a life for himself as an expat wallah.

The book is an able companion to the traveller's discovery of modern India; an informed and compassionate catch-up on the last twenty years of Indian current events.

Inhaling the Mahatma
By Christopher Kremmer
HarperCollins, 2006
419 pages

The Monkey Incident

2010-05-02T02:51:00.001-04:00

There we were, man and monkey, separated only by a few strands of DNA and a few feet--or paws--of concrete balcony.

So lazily does the town of Gopalpur confide in the traveller its few splendors--the silhouettes of the fishermen in the orange dawning sun; the casual arrival of the cool sea breeze in afternoon; the frothy gathering of merry weekenders on the beach at dusk--that he finds himself spending much of his day lying in languorous wait.

Thus were we laying in bed, at about a quarter past six, the sunrise having recently greeted our bleary eyes, barely half awake, blissfully nothing to do, except secretly wish that the invigorating sea air flowing through the open windows and balcony door of our fourth-storey hotel room did not carry the awful decibels of those sonofabitch roosters.

Then, my partner: "Ohmygodtheresamonkeyintheroom! Monkey!"

There was, in fact, a monkey in the room. A large monkey. It came in, as though by standard arrangement, through the open balcony door, and reached for Ashley's (gasp!) anti-malarial medication, which comes in a shiny-foil, glinting-brightly-off-the-morning-sunlight wrapping.

We sprang up in bed and pressed against the wall. Monkey, startled, retreated to the balcony. There was a broom. I took the broom in hand and crept toward the balcony door. Broom-first, eyes-second, I peered around the corner of the door frame.

There were two plastic chairs on the balcony. Monkey was behind the second. In the next moment, Monkey picked up the chair, threw it violently to the ground, and leapt up, screeching, into the open window frame beside the door frame beside me. (Yes, all in one moment.)

Monkey=Victor. Champion of this unlikely field of battle. (After all, we're four storeys up, on the roof, without a treetop in sight, and we have no food in the room.)

The casualties: Ashley and I, refugees in the hallway of the hotel, having fled outside our own room, in our underwear, possibly now without our shiny package of anti-malarial drugs and who knows what else Monkey is helping itself too.

But Monkey left, having burgled nothing but several weeks' worth of our heartbeats. And we were left to wonder:

If we were naked and Monkey wore underwear, would the battle have gone the other way?

Dhalafel

2010-04-28T06:26:00.003-04:00

Theory: Necessity is the mother of invention.
Corollary: An empty belly is the mother of all necessity.
Ergo: A rumbling tummy is the, er, grandmother of invention.

The other day my partner Ashley made a hearty, spicy dhal (split-lentil soup/sauce) for lunch. After spending the afternoon in the fridge, by suppertime the leftovers had congealed almost to the consistency of mashed potatoes or mashed garbanzos, at which point--my tummy rumbling--I concocted the following:

Dhalafel (alt.sp. Dalafel)
1 batch leftover dhal, congealed (liquid drained), formed into balls approximately two inches in diameter;
1 small bunch fresh coriander (cilantro), finely chopped;
Whole wheat flour;
Vegetable (e.g. sunflower) oil;
Salt and pepper to taste;
New Lall's green chilli sauce to garnish.

Spread flour on a plate. Season dhalafel balls with salt, pepper and coriander, then roll in the flour. (If using just a little oil in a wok, as I did, then flatten the balls a bit so they cook better; if deep frying, never mind.) Fry dhalafel balls in hot oil until golden and crispy on all sides (yet still deliciously mashy on the inside).

Serve on a platter, garnished with chopped coriander and green chilli sauce.

Option: make dhalafel sandwiches in roti, with fresh sliced tomato and onion, and a dash of fresh-squeezed lime juice.

Got other ideas for the mighty dhalafel, let me know.

Quote-Unquote: Salman Rushdie

2010-04-26T21:35:00.001-04:00

"Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the story less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on."
--Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, 1981, p. 59.

(Context: My current leisure reading; also, the subtle invoking of red meat makes my tummy long for the days of its ancestors!)

Steamrolled by the Great Freight Train of Irony

2010-04-25T21:18:00.104-04:00

Last week my very bubbly and energetic colleague KD invited me to accompany him on a field visit to the village of Chandragiri, where PREM was conducting a communications workshop with a few dozen of its fieldworkers.

I happily and excitedly agreed.

As we continued our mutually happy and excited discussion about my coming along, I slowly worked out that not only was I going to attend this workshop, but I was going to co-lead the workshop, and would I be so good as to formulate the official agenda and give a one-hour powerpoint presentation on best practices for effective communication in the field?

Oh? Um. Of... course. I'd be very happy to do this (on one day's notice, still knowing very little about the organization I'm working with, and not having created a powerpoint presentation since my final year of undergrad, twelve long years ago!).

KD's happiness index went from effervescent to Eyjafjallajökullian.

So the next day, off we went.

(I shall describe the beautiful village of Chandragiri--two and a half hours' drive from Berhampur up in the hills of the Gajapati district--in another post.)

The workshop was quite successful. Of thirty-five fieldworkers invited, about half were able to attend, despite the distance they must travel from their villages and the time they must take away from their families and work. (Though all fieldworkers are salaried by PREM, they also have other seasonal work, mainly agricultural in their villages.)

KD led the early morning session with some contextual information about the workshop and PREM's ongoing work. I led an energizer. After a couple of participatory exercises, it was my turn to plug in and talk about best practices for effective communication.

Then the power went out.

KD to the rescue; he ad-libbed a discussion on the critical importance of fieldworkers communicating effectively, since they represent the grassroots knowledge base of the entire organization.

When we got power, I was back in the spotlight. I'd budgeted only thirty minutes for my presentation, hoping to save the other half hour for group discussion (assuming, of course, that anyone found my presentation enlightening).

However, I'd neglected to take into account the need for KD to translate (and elaborate thence) every slide I presented in English into Oriya. Most of our fieldworkers read and write in English well enough, but understand very little, especially my accent. To stave off an hour of my speaking to blank, though politely nodding, faces, KD rescued me at each turn.

Occupying that unenviable time slot in the late morning just before the lunch break, and not speaking the local language, and being (by my presence as a foreigner, for some the first they've ever met) a general oddity in the room, by the end of my talk I was resigned to and content with the fact that my presentation on best practices for effective communication had been steamrolled by the great freight train of irony.

But somehow it seems my determined bullet-pointedness got through to a few of the group, who told me afterwards that they feel stronger about their ability to do their work well.

KD was beaming all through lunch. "Mr Richard," he said, glowing. "That was a great presentation. So great. Really great."

"Thank you," I replied humbly and somewhat disbelieving. But KD's wide eyes put me at ease. He is a very self-conscious young man; having worked his way up through PREM to become a field manager, he is ever cognizant of ways he can improve his work and be a more effective leader. He genuinely views me as someone from whom he can learn a lot, me and my rusty powerpoint skills. As we ate lunch, he looked like he wanted something more from me.

"Really, it was a great presentation. Um, do you have another?"

---
Photos in this post:
1-A ploughed field in Chandragiri village.
2-A sandalwood tree just outside the conference centre.
3-KD presenting to the workshop.
4-A mango tree on PREM's campus in Chandragiri.
(Click all photos to enlarge.)

The People's Rural Education Movement

2010-04-23T05:29:00.005-04:00

Fight poverty through individual empowerment. Fight it with education. Fight it with rights-based collective action. Fight it while looking directly in its face.

If PREM had a mantra, this could be it.

The organization I now find myself working with began thirty years ago as a small group of determined social activists who identified an enormous gap in the social and political development--and the subsequent marginalization and poverty--of several rural communities here in Orissa:

The adivasi--the aboriginal people of India, the First Nations, in a sense--make up almost a quarter of Orissa's population and number over 80 million in all of India. There are 62 scheduled tribes here in Orissa numbering between 500 and one million in population. They are distinct from mainstream Hindu-dominant Indian society by language, by history, and very often by geography. They live in remote villages, often in the vast forestland and expansive hill country of central India. Rarely have they, by choice or by force, assimilated into the dominant culture, and therefore they remain marginalized and poor almost beyond description.

The dalits--erstwhile known as untouchables, or the lowest-caste sector of Indian socio-political hierarchy--make up nearly twenty per cent of Orissa's population. By rigid cultural design they live on the margins of society, unable to advance beyond the boundaries set by a vast system of social classification, even if modern democratic rights have prescribed otherwise. Many dalits have converted to Christianity (or in other areas of India, Buddhism or Sikhism) to transcend caste repression, and this in many cases has had the result of even further marginalization and repression.*

Until a generation ago, for dalits and adivasi in southern and western Orissa, terms like development and education and human rights were as foreign as the concept of a free, democratic India.

The tools these social activists began to apply to address this marginalization, this gap:

1) Education--starting with functional literacy and progressing to the kind of transformational, holistic, liberatory approach theorized by Paulo Freire and others;
2) Sustainable Development--agricultural and horticultural innovations, conservation, water management, food security, health awareness;
3) Community-Based Organizations (CBOs)--sustainable livelihood, village financial trusts, micro-financing initiatives, women's cooperatives, local schools and vocational training centres, an inclusive and consensus-based (rather than top-down and welfare-based) approach to all reaches of development;
4) Advocacy--social mobilization, government lobbying, demanding the implementation of democratic rights.

Today, PREM is a robust network of several dozen partner NGOs, thousands of village-level CBOs, and more than a million people working together, not as charity from have to have-not, but as a collective force against systemic poverty.

And here I am. My title is that of "Communications and Documentation Advisor" (not a lesser name for this rose!), but really I'm here as much to learn from this energetic and successful movement as I am to impart any skill or wisdom I may have accumulated.

* I have never read a Wikipedia entry more inaccurate or misleading than the entry for Dalit. For a better context, start with this article on the difference between a handful of successful dalits in Indian society and a few hundred million who remain impoverished by what is effectively an unending system of repression, despite recent political/legal acts to demarginalize them.

Quote-Unquote: Mahatma Gandhi

2010-04-19T07:26:00.000-04:00

"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history."
--Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, attributed.

(Context: Quoted in the introduction to PREM: The Heartbeat of a Movment, 2003.)

Oriya: Language of Imagination

2010-04-16T06:39:00.000-04:00

Melting light bulbs. Dancing jellyfish. Stormtroopers making silly faces.

These are but a few ways of imagining the peculiar and extremely unique script of the Oriya language, the mother tongue of the state of Orissa.

Categorically speaking, Oriya is a relation of the Sanskritic subfamily of Indo-Aryan languages (as compared to the Dravidian languages of southern India), along with Hindi and Bengali and others. But unlike the latter two languages which use Devanagari scripts, with their characteristic horizontal lines mounting each word, the Oriya script, derived from ancient Kalinga, is looped, and its letters stand alone.

Among the various scripts of the thirty-odd quasi-official languages of India, Oriya is perhaps the most striking. As your humble blogger learns to speak and understand the language he will certainly report. For an introduction, let your imagination run wild with the dreamy script of Oriya.

What do you see when you look at Oriya? (For the full alphabet, click here.)

India Book Review: A New History of India, by Stanley Wolpert

2010-04-14T04:05:00.000-04:00

Reading UCLA historian Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India (8th ed.) is your (and my) just punishment for not taking an Intro to India course at university.

And reading the dense volume passim in 35-minute intervals on the TTC* during a typically bleak Canadian February (as I did) might be the best way to approach the book (and might actually make winter look not too difficult by comparison).

To be fair, Wolpert’s history of India, now in its eighth edition (the academic equivalent of the best-seller list and the Oprah book club, combined), offers you infinitely more insight and considerably more depth than those forgettable history passages in Lonely Planet.

From the Vedic civilization’s economic development to agricultural innovation on the Deccan plateau; from Hindu philosophy to the Dutch East India Company; from Mughal ascendancy to English utilitarianism to the political context of the assassination of Gandhi—actually of several Gandhis—Wolpert has you covered with agonizingly precise historical minutiae of the sort that usually attracts only lonely history buffs and comatose hospital patients (the latter in book-on-tape form, obviously).

Still, it is patently irresponsible to attempt to travel India without some concept of its history, and although there are more enjoyable ways to devour it, there is no more complete way (possibly short of enrolling in Wolpert’s class). Read it before you travel but carry it along at your own risk; while it is a sure-footed reference guide, it is not a light book!

A New History of India (8th ed.)
By Stanley Wolpert
Oxford University Press, 2009
548 pages

* TTC equals Toronto Transit Commission, or more specifically the Dundas and Spadina streetcars for this blogger.