Muslim + Jew + Black = Great Music for All (Ahmed Ertegun)

There are examples of successful cross cultural collaboration. The NY Times obituary of Ahmed Ertegun today offers such an example:

"Mr. Ertegun’s music partnerships, he sometimes pointed out, were often culturally triangular. He was Turkish and a Muslim by birth. Many of his fellow executives, like the producer Jerry Wexler, were Jewish. The artists they produced, particularly when the label began, were black. Together, they helped move rhythm and blues to the center of American popular music."

Click on the title to see the rest of the NYTimes article.

Amritsar Street Scene

Here's my first video post. This was 11 November in Amritsar, Punjab, India.

Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides and other troubling issues

Lots of things entered my brain while we were in India, and got lost somewhere in the mass of new data. Farmer suicides was such an item. This was mentioned in the conference - there was some debate whether it was really higher than in the past or whether it was just getting more attention; whether the media attention was spurring more suicides - but I didn't really understand the issue. It was also mentioned in the press. (India has a lot of English language newspapers aimed at Indians, not foreigners.) This morning I heard Vandana Shiva on Democracy Now, talking about Farmer Suicides, which she linked to farmers going into debt buying expensive, genetically modified seeds from Monsanto and others. These seeds are non-renewable, they must be bought each year. US subsidies for US cotton farmers also plays a role here by keeping the price of cotton, a major Indian crop, low. And farmers can't pay their debts, can't buy (before they could have harvested) new seeds. It is easy for us in the US to be blind to the impacts of our multi-national corporations, of the various world trade agreements. We don't see the impacts, they aren't covered in the mainstream media. So I invite readers to check out this particular interview on
Democracy Now and to listen to other interviews on Democracy Now and other alternative media.

There are no easy answers, but at least we need to know the questions, and I think most Americans, me included, are woefully unaware of how our country impacts the rest of the world. Yes, we're starting to get a clue about Iraq. Linking war to dead bodies is fairly easy, but understanding the links between trade agreements, copyrights and patents, and poverty and farmer suicides is far more difficult.



Who is Vandana Shiva? From the Democracy Now website: Vandana Shiva, world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. She is also a physicist and ecologist and the Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology. She is the founder of Navdanya -"nine seeds", a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds. Dr. Shiva was the 1993 recipient of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize -the Right Livelihood Award. And she is the author of many books, her latest is "Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace.",

Note on the pictures: Obviously, the interview has a different impact on me since I was just in India and drove through some of the states mentioned in the interview, and have images to connect to what she is saying. To give you a little sense of this I've added two pictures. The first is from the car driving through rural Maharashtra State. (Mumbai (Bombay) is the capital of Maharashtra). I'm not 100% certain, but I think this is cotton being taken to the market. The ox carts carry the bags to the road, to be loaded onto trucks. We saw this also with sugar cane. The picture at the bottom is from the plane, landing in Mumbai. It's of one of the many shanty towns as rural people, some because they've lost their land, move into the cities. If you click on the pictures, you can see them a little larger. Hit 'skip this ad' in the upper right corner to get to the article faster.

Alex and Neetu - finally

I mentioned
Alex and Neetu a while back. We met them at the Kochi airport getting on a flight to Bangalore. They were headed on for Delhi and we for Goa. They are an Indian-American couple from the Chicago area. They were in India to visit relatives all over India, including Kerala, Punjab, and Delhi. So here's the picture I took of them after we landed in Bangalore.



And this is Rameez and his friend. They began talking to us on Fort Cochin Island while we waited for the ferry. They are both studying English at Calicut. When I asked whether his clothing meant he was a Muslim, he said yes and promptly asked if I was a Christian. When I said "No, I'm a Jew" he smiled and asked if we had visited the old Synagogue in Kochi. We had that day. Although his very first question had been, "What Country?" (one of the common questions Indians ask foreigners) and he knew we were from the US, he now checked that again and ask if we were Israeli. When we got off the ferry on the other side, there was a swarm of his friends who'd been on the ferry with us.

Dan Moore - Comedian and Film Maker

While in Seattle we got a chance to see Dan perform. In the interest of full disclosure, Dan is my daughter's boyfriend. And I had never seen him perform. That night he was part of a lineup of about seven comics at the Comedy Underground. It was a benefit performance for the Cascade Land Conservancy. I was rather pleasantly surprised by all the performers that night - they were all good. Perhaps this was a result of this being something of a political event, so the routines had a political focus rather than the more common jokes about various body functions. Dan really stood out. He took on a totally different persona as he did his routine - different voice, different accent, pacing, everything. It was more like acting than normal stand up comedy. It was a polished piece with a rhythm and a structure that had it ending in the same vein that it began. And he was funny.

Is this review biased because of the relationship? I don't think so, though I might not have posted it if I didn't know him.

Cross Cultural Divide: Tips for Indian salesmen working with Westerners

In Jaipur we talked with a young man with green/grey eyes. It was in one of the big bazaars inside the walls of the old city. Not far from this picture. See more about the picture at the bottom. He was trying to sell us something, but not too hard. We started talking about Indian salespeople and foreign tourists. He pointed out a foreign couple in a shop and said, "Why are they so rude? No, not really rude, but very cold?"

We'd been thinking about this topic since India day one, but the other way around. What is it that Indian salesmen (not women) do that is so very annoying? I'm only going to speak for the two of us, though I suspect it can be generalized to other Americans and maybe even Europeans to some extent. Well, here's what we came up with:

1. Private space - We have an invisible private space at least two feet around us. Indians trying to sell us things move in way past that invisible line, automatically making us unconfortable. So stand back. Don't push things into our hands, right in front of our faces. Don't stand right up next to us if you want us to be comfortable. (I'm assuming that if we are comfortable we are more likely to listen and perhaps buy. You may have found if you make us uncomfortable, some Westerners will just buy to get rid of you and their discomfort.)

2. Initiating the interaction - We are used to going into stores to buy things, not being accosted on the street by people selling us things. When we are in the stores, we are used to being asked something like, "May I help you?" We've even had laws past to stop people from phoning us at home to sell something. We like to do the initiating. In India, the salesmen do the initiating combined with #1 above. We immediately get uncomfortable and defensive.

3. Strangers in a strange land - We are in a place where everything is new and different from what we are used to. We don't know the rules. We don't know how to read people. Are they being genuinely nice or are they just trying to sell me something. We had a number of people come up to us offering help ("Can I help you find something?"). They were charming, but eventually it became clear they had an ulterior motive - something they wanted to sell us, a shop they wanted us to visit.
We really didn't know how to distinguish between those who were being friendly and helpful and those who were hustling us. So when people came up to us, we were automatically suspicious, because the others had come to us in the guise of offering help, but really to hustle us. In addition, if we are possibly interested, Indian Rupees still don't mean that much to us and we are still having trouble figuring out how much things cost in US dollars. So we are possibly not saying anything because we are trying to calculate. Some of you have figured this out and have calculators all ready.

4. Persistence - At home, if I say, "No thank you" the salesperson generally backs off, or at most might ask, "Is there anything else you might need today?" In India, it seemed that "No thank you" meant "Yes, please show me more." "No!!! I'M NOT INTERESTED, LEAVE ME ALONE" seemed to be translated as "OK, I'm establishing a bargaining position, what's your next offer?" etc. We weren't speaking the same language.

So, it isn't that the foreign couple is being rude or cold (well, some may be), but they are going through a cross-cultural confusion. The messages they are getting - 1, 2, 3, and 4 above - are all building up to make them very uncomfortable and suspicious. They are pushed into a defensive mode. Meanwhile, the Indian salesmen (except for those who are intentionally exploiting this discomfort) feel the foreginers are rude or cold.

And on the other side, I recognize that foreigners often have more money in their pockets (or money belts, and certainly on their credit cards) than the average Indian makes in a year. And we don't have a good sense of what things cost in India (much less for most things than they cost back home) and so we are likely to spend more. People who don't have shops for us to go into - children and adults selling toursit items and the guides at every tourist site, rickshaw drivers, and street vendors - are for the most part not making a lot of money and have to compete with all the other people after our money. Being aggressive may be the most successful strategy, even if it irritates lots of foreigners.

I can give you a view of what it looks like from our side, but I can only guess at what we look like through your eyes. I'm sure, for instance, that when you offer us tea in your shops, it is part of traditional Indian hospitality. But we can't help but think, if we take the tea, then we have to buy.

Photo notes: This was an interesting situation. The tie dye process was so colorful I asked if I could take a picture. When it was done, the kid standing on the right started to ask for Rupees. He did it in a way that I knew he was playing around - but the tie dye guy really told him to stuff it and not act that way. So, this is an example of the opposite of everything I'm talking about above.

Books - One Night @ the Call Center and Ancient Promises

Jaishree Misra's Ancient Promises tells the story of a Delhi girl who spends summers with grandparents in Kerala. Although she goes to an all girl parochial school, she manages to fall in love with a boy from the connected boys school. When he leaves for three years in England, she is sure she'll never see him again, and acquieces to a proposal from a 'good family' in Kerala that has been looking for a suitable wife for their son. The marriage doesn't go so well in this beautifully written story about families in India.






One Night @ the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat was on the India best seller list. It follows several characters one night (with flashbacks to other times) at a call center in Gaurgon, the tech suburb of New Delhi. It's a glimpse of those now infamous call centers from the other side. While there are comments about the American callers on the other side (they use a 30:10 ratio in the training class to remind the workers to be patient because a 30 year old American has the intelligence of a 10 year old Indian) much of it is about the relationships of the workers, working for a stupid, ambitious boss, and how the good salaries they make entices them to put up with all sorts of humiliations. (Note, this seems to answer a question I had in an earlier post about how much call center workers make. In the book they make 15,000 Rupees per month (about $336).

Bhagat's first book - Five Point Someone - follows three classmates at India's extremely hard to get into Indian Institute of Technology, where students' status is based on the grade level. If you are a Five point something, you are definitely lower caste. This book is less polished than Call Center, but it is an interesting glimpse at life in this exclusive university.

Awazdo

This is a follow up on the earlier post "Blow Horn" While driving back from Ellora Caves we saw AWAZDO on the back of a truck. I asked Surendra, the driver, what it meant. He said, "Awaz" - horn. "Do" - and with his hand gesturing palm up fingers curling toward him - 'give me.' So there it was in romanized Hindi.





And then there was this one - a combination of Hindi and English! (The 'de' is part of the 'do' from what I can tell)






And just as proof that the world works in mysterious ways, while looking for blogger help (I'm back on Safari browser on Mac and blogger doesn't have an automated link insert for Safari) to do the link, I peeked at their highlighted blog -
pimped-japanese-trucks.

Back Home

Here I am at the computer at home after nearly six weeks of traveling. It seems like nothing has changed, yet much has - for the better. It was low 30s when we got here, pretty much what it was when we left. The visit in Seattle got us a little closer to this weather, so it didn't really feel cold. I've got lots of India processing in my head and will try to post more pictures and thoughts. In the meantime, here's Kona, Joel and Carrie's new dog, with Monica (and Joel's feet), and solo.

Leaving Delhi. Arriving LA, Beach

(Whoops, thought I'd published this, only saved it as a draft. So it comes after I've posted that we are home.)

There were a few times in India when I thought I would be ready for that airplane home. But as time got closer, I really didn't want to leave. The return to Delhi after the trip to the caves was wonderful. Nishant and Nitin picked us up at the airport and we went back to the guest house we'd been to before. The staff was welcoming. Delhi was familiar, but seemed cleaner, less chaotic, and much easier to be in. (More a reflection on our changes, not Delhi's, is my guess.) It was cooler than when we first came (low's around 15C(@60F), highs around 30C(85F), and considerably cooler and drier than south India. Nishant and Nitin were fantastic, as they were the whole time.

We somehow managed to land in New Jersey just after the storm left. Despite the pilot's warning that things would get turbulent (they served breakfast early and didn't serve hot tea or coffee), there was no turbulence, and the the sky was clear and the day beautiful. Santa Monica beach was glorious.


Most of the flight to LA we looked down thru crystal clear air at the dramatic landscape of the US. LA was spectacularly clear and just slightly cooler than Delhi, and much drier. Flying in you could see forever - including Catalina Island. It was good to see my Mom, and we didn't know our son would be there too. We'll see him again Tuesday in Seattle.

Drving back to my Mom's house last night on the Ventura and San Diego Freeways (I know, modern Angelinos use the numbers, but in the old days we used the names of the freeways, and that's how I know them), I was struck by how quiet it was. All I could hear was the whoosing noise of tires on the pavement. There were no loud engine noises. Cars stayed in their lanes. No autorickshaws. And the whole 20 minute drive I never heard a single car horn!

Word has been it's been 20 below F (-29C) in Anchorage. We're hoping it's warmed up before we get home Wednesday.