adventures in Tamil Nadu and a digression on Egypt

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Upon leaving the orphanage I was immediately thrown back into the chaos. I made my train by the skin of my teeth, another thirty seconds and I would have missed it. It was a cliched movie like moment where I had to run with all my baggage and jump on the last car as it pulled away. Unfortunately my car was at the opposite end, so that at the next stop i had to jump off and run the two hundred meters as fast as I could to where my car was located. Sweaty, exhausted, overwhelmed, I began my marathon 18 hour train ride to Chennai.

The sleeper car was filled to capacity, but I lucked out in that the people I sat next to were very friendly and spoke English. Throughout the day there was the steady stream of legless cripples shuffling on their hands, a young girl with extreme makeup doing handstands and cartwheels down the isle, barefoot bearded holy men dressed in either all red or all black chanting and banging on hand drums, all asking for a little change. I also had another run in with one of the strange women who go around clapping at people and asking for money, whom on a previous train ride the other passengers had described as "a gay." This time when I asked they were more precise, stating "she is neither male nor female."

I arrived in Chennai at 3 AM and spent a few hours sleeping in the corner of the train station. Eventually the overwhelming stench of stale piss became more powerful than my exhaustion, and I met the day. I had to figure out how to get to Tiruninravur, a small village 30km outside the city where Mrs. large had told me I could stay at the campus where the girls' home was located before they moved the students up to Visag. After figuring out how to buy my local train ticket I found myself an hour later standing outside what appeared to be an abandoned gated compound. I stood there a while before deciding I would climb the fence. Of course mid-jump I was spotted by the caretaker who ran over gesticulating and yelling. His wife also came out who struck me a fiery woman and started yelling as well. He did not speak any English though I think he could tell by my general friendliness I wasn't trying to cause any trouble, and he recognized the names of people in the orphanage that we both knew. He went in and called the orphanage in Visag and fortunately that caused a total turnaround in their demeanor. They brought out piles of fruit and rice and set up a cot for me. I stayed there for three days. In the evenings we would go on walks into the village and afterward they would sprawl out on the cement patio laughing and talking to one another. One night I shared with them the Telegu I had learned and for some reason the woman found this the funniest thing she had ever heard, and nearly started crying from laughing so hard, though I couldn't figure out what was funny. Another night we bought a bunch of vegetables and decided to take a rickshaw back to the compound. We were crammed in with another group and I counted eleven people in a space meant for three. A very old woman was sitting on my feet and all I could think about every time we hit a violent bump was that I hoped she still had bladder control. Chennai was perhaps the dirtiest city on earth and I didn't spend much time there.

I spent a week a hundred kilometers south of Chennai in the city of Pondicherry. An old French fort town, it still has cobblestone streets and brick town houses. It is a big tourist destination as made clear by the white people who have been conspicuously absent from the rest of my time here. It is a small taste of home: rooftop bars, Italian pizza parlors, Budweiser, seafront coffee shops. It is clean, at least by Indian standards. I told an American couple at a coffee shop that I thought this was clean and they looked at me like I had lost my mind, but my frame of reference was Chennai as where theirs was America.

Between my hotel and the building 50m away is situated a slum. My room directly above has given me the opportunity to do some interesting people watching. The sidewalk between the slum and the hotel is a series of slabs of concrete over the sewer. They were laid poorly and there are large gaps between every other one, a nightmare for walking as you have to constantly look down in order to not fall in. The people of the slum use it as their bathroom, and at any given time of day men/boys, young and old, will be crouching over it defecating into the exposed drainage. I haven't seen women do this, though I have seen them throw pots of stuff in there which I assume means that they empty themselves into pots and then pour the pots into the sewer...I hope they are not the same pots they use for cooking. Their shelters are built in/around an old brick building which looks to have burned down at some point in the past, as only the foundation is still standing. They have plastic sheets which serve as a roof, next to which are blankets where they eat and lounge and above which are clothes lines hanging with pants and shirts and towels. There are many kids but no private space which leads me to believe that the adults have sex in the immediate vicinity of their children and neighbors, a strange paradox to the extreme conservatism that governs other aspects of their culture. One day as I walked out of my hotel a boy that I recognized from the slum came up and asked in decent English for money, claiming he was hungry. I replied that I found that unlikely since I had watched him eat a breakfast of rice curry and a banana not ten minutes before. He justifiably looked very confused and creeped out by this.

I spent yesterday wandering Chidambaram, in particular the massive Nataraja temple complex celebrating Shiva's victory in a dance competition judged by an assembly of the gods. The complex was massive with four huge temple structures and a series of smaller buildings, many housing smaller shrines. Inside were shirtless men with white chalk or paint performing ritual ablutions. I wandered around for a while looking at the art work and sculptures, it was massive and impressive. Unfortunately I wasn't sure what the significance of most of what I saw; one of the affects of this trip is an awareness of my vast ignorance.

I also wanted to make a few comments about what is happening in Egypt. In hindsight there were several interactions that are meaningful in light of current events, though there was no way to predict that this was going to happen just like there is no way to predict the future now. I remember sitting on the bank of the Nile in Luxor across from the Sofitel Winter Palace. The server told me that when the president comes to Luxor that is where he stays, that the city officials clean the streets and put the poor beggars out of sight so that he won’t see them. The waiter believed that Mubarak’s view of his country was sterilized and distanced from the reality of Egyptian life. Whether that is true isn’t nearly as important as the fact that people believed it to be true. In Cairo I had a taxi driver who started talking about exploitation and the “small people” (a phrase that came up a lot). I assumed because I was white and had admitted to being from America that he was talking about either imperialism or Iraq, but in fact he said that he was talking about the Egyptian government. The family that I stayed with in Cairo only wanted to talk about the political situation. Unfortunately most of it was in Arabic so I don’t know the specifics, but occasionally one of them would lean over and fill me in. The basic feeling was summed up with the oft repeated phrase “Egypt is a rich country full of poor people.” After one of the sons spent the day driving me around to Memphis and the smaller pyramids he told me how much he had to pay in bribes to do basic things like park the car. It amounted to over 100pounds, a huge sum for the normal Egyptian to do something that basic (I paid). In Alexandria I met an extremely intelligent young man named Tarooq whom I wrote about at the time who was mentally shackled by the limitations for intelligent young Egyptians born to modest means. I was shocked to find out that the average civil servant, including police (it will be interesting to see if the police stay loyal) make 600pounds a month, or roughly $110, barely enough for a single man and not nearly enough for a family. In hindsight it is striking how the few Egyptians I spent any amount of time with wanted to talk about the same motivations that we are now seeing cause violence in Cairo. None of them (as far as i know) were devout Muslims, much less fundamentalists. On the bus ride from Cairo to Sharm-el Sheikh our ID’s were checked seven times. A casual glance at history shows the two greatest causes for revolution are a lack of identification between the people and the government, and a disparity between rising expectations and real economic opportunity. The second point is probably as much a result of the current recession as anything else. Both of these conditions exist in abundance in Egypt. A casual glimpse at history also shows that successful "revolutions of the people" rarely work out well for anyone, especially "the people."

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Comments

[Patrice]

Katelyn, etc
Hi Chris, I check your blog now and then and am impressed with your adventures and your writing. Just an FYI since you're writing here about Egypt. Katelyn and the other students are being evacuated tomorrow from Alexandria.. arriving DC on Tuesday or Wed. If you haven't read her latest blog entries, they're interesting. Stay safe... keep writing! Patrice

[HT Tom]

The School and Egypt
Hi Chris, Sounds like you're doing well. I liked reading about your time at the school. Again, very good writing. Mrs. Large sounds like quite a good person. It must be difficult to take care of so many children under these circumstances. The children look healthy and happy in the pictures. It must be interesting for you to see the news on Egypt, especially after just leaving there. I think you're right about the causes of this uprising. Media here downplays the role of the current world eceonomic crisis, but that does play a role there, just as you noted, I think. Take care.

[Brian]

I was hired 8 weeks ago by Baltimore County Police. Telling you this serves two purposes: 1) I got a job. Hooray. 2) The point you made about the police in Egypt is very intriguing. I'm glad you seem to be expanding mentally throughout this trip, as is evident in your writing; I was worried your mind would shut down from all of the overwhelming daily events. Stay Safe.