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Five million people named Patel came together for a six-day festival at the nearby temple and town of Unjha. We joined them in celebrating Patel progress and culture.

Every few decades, the Patidar caste has a huge gathering. The last one was in 1976. Patels are historically businessmen and farmers. In Gujarat, well over half the population are members of the various Patel sub-castes. The festival helps raise money for various educational foundations. But mainly, it's about religion and Patel pride.

Seven of us--Hiren and Chandrika and their kids--piled into Alkesh's car and braved the crazy traffic around the fair. Dozens of jam-packed buses zoomed around us, shuttling people back and forth from the surrunding towns. Many additional people rode on the roofs of the buses, holding on and cheering. The festival-goers needed all the transportation they could get; most people here don't have private cars. Those people who are lucky enough to own their own vehicles usually have motorcycles instead. The parking lots were filled with motorbikes as far as we could see; Michael said the number of motorcycles was more than the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in North Dakota. Alkesh parked in one of the relatively few automobile lots and we joined the throngs of people.

The sheer numbers were daunting, but the festival had good logistical management. Barriers herded people into queues, with artfully decorated solid walls to stop people ducking under. Brightly colored cloth covered the ground everywhere, keeping the dust down. For once, manure was not a problem; guards and fences kept the cows out of the main areas. Litter control was rather lacking, however.  We shuffled our way through mini-snowdrifts of discarded plastic cups around the overflowing dust-bins.

Superficially, the festival is similar to a big state fair. There's a combination of amusement-park rides and educational exhibitions. There's also a lot of shopping; all the various industries are represented. Everyone who is anyone is there. So Toyota and Tata motors showed off their gleaming new cars. Energy companies displayed new CFL light-bulbs. We even saw a vendor selling cotton candy (pure-veg, of course).  I wanted to see the agricultural exhibits, but it was late and most of the exhibits had closed. One of the few open booths was sponsoring a campaign against the worldwide eating of beef. They tried to single us out and ask us to sign a petition. We declined.

Unlike US fairs, this festival had a very strong underlying religious aspect. The temple at the center of the fair is a major part of the devotions. Chandrika, Hiren's wife, had joined the tens of thousands who walked 25 kilometers to the temple at Unjha, leaving at moonrise and arriving in the early morning.
Our favorite part was a display of old black-and-white photographs. They showed historic Gujarati life in villages, with traditional farming methods and ethnic costumes. We couldn't read the dates, but it was nice to see those windows into Gujarat's past. That was a very small part of the festival. The recurring theme showed the past as an afterthought, to contrast with how far they've come and how modern they are now. America is such a young country; we have so little history when compared to India. It's great that Indians are proud of their progress, but they have such a rich heritage, too.

It was great to meet the other Indian Fulbrighters and their families at the Fulbright conference.

The Indian Fulbright conference takes place every Thanksgiving weekend. The US-India Educational Foundation (USIEF) sponsors it for people who are in India for the fall semester. Many Fulbright India grants are for the spring, and there's another, larger South Asian conference then. These conferences are a mix of bright, creative students, scholars, and schoolteachers. And a few dependents, like me.

The people came from very diverse backgrounds and life stages. For example, a panel on "Being a Cultural Ambassador" included the following: A dynamic mid-fifties widow, traveling to schools around India, lecturing on strategies for teaching blind and visually-impaired students. An Indian-American art scholar with a six-month-old child, documenting the Chennai art museum's formation of Indian cultural identity. A fortysomething Haitian immigrant and science teacher; her late-teenage son has brown skin that often lets him pass for Indian. A bright, recent college graduate of East Asian descent, teaching English in a Delhi government school. And the lone (first-ever) Fulbright scholar to Bhutan, an Oklahoman professor studying tobacco policy and also happening to be the highest official American presence in that country.

I only attended one presentation session. There were a couple different tracks, and it was well-organized so the technical topics were grouped together. Michael led off with his presentation, telling how he's inserted critical design thinking into the Indian examination-based system that rewards rote memorization. Another participant described the growing Indian biotech industry, and how it's being limited by a severe lack of venture capital; he's now working with the government to try to create something like an Indian NIH. Another scholar, one of the other two computer science professors, gave a very interesting talk on how he had adapted a chemistry-based peer learning approach. He is also teaching students to contribute to Free and Open-Source Software. I asked him how they felt working in the FOSS community, since sometimes open-source can be rather insular and male-American-dominant. He replied that like India, there is a huge diversity in open-source software projects; you just have to find the right community. I agreed, and mentioned DreamWidth (the very blog I'm writing this on), as one such safe place.

The best part of the conference was talking one-on-one with the other people. They're very bright people doing fascinating work. Nora, the teacher for blind students, described the astonished reactions when she tells of Jacob Bolotin, the blind, American heart/lung doctor--in 1912. And Kim, a biology teacher on a teacher-exchange, described how she challenges her students to find their intelligence among the eight different types of intelligence. She also spoke of some of the economic struggles in her rural Oregon hometown, which echo the tribulations of my childhood town in rural Michigan. We also chatted at length with the Bhutan scholar, who is as nice as he is interesting; we had a great speculative discussion ranging from Bhuddist causality in economic systems to science fiction to modern Middle East politics.

We also traded stories of gender experiences in India. One woman, a feminist scholar in Delhi, was passionately fired up about the "Eve-teasing" problems there. Another, a young mother, had colleagues who felt she was neglecting her child (who was with his father during the day). I shared my surprise at the numerous stay-at-home faculty moms in north Gujarat, who have the same engineering degrees as their husbands but never use them. Yet another mentioned how she had invited the professors from her institution over to drink a toast to her late father-in-law when he passed away. None of them showed up, and they apologized the next day that men do not drink alcohol in front of women. Overall, it sounds like there's somewhat more gender equality in South India and the cities. It's still a far cry from America.

I talked with some of the other dependents, too. There were several families with elementary-age children or younger. A handful of us spouses/partners are working. One is working for the Clinton Foundation; she's helping clinics reduce mother-to-child AIDS transmission from 50% to 1% with the right drugs. Another is a computer engineer, working at IBM in Bangalore. A few other spouses, who are also faculty on their sabbaticals, are working on grant proposals. One or two moms volunteer at their children's schools or just deal with running the household.

Michael and I knew that living in our small town was better than we'd expected. Now, talking with others, we really appreciate Visnagar and the college. USIEF likes sending people to small towns, because they'll be appreciated there and well cared-for. Many of the researchers who went to big cities had to struggle with day-to-day problems; they were put in moldy living quarters, or their host institutions didn't give them an office for two months. Some of the students just go home at night and hole up in their dorm rooms; they're totally missing the broader experience of living here. The more mature people are better able to deal with the idiosyncracies of Indian life. That group includes Michael and me, though we're barely in our 30s. I think it helps to have the right attitude, of going out and embracing another culture.

In between meals, I teleworked from the hotel room. Most of it was offline; the Internet access cost 100 rupees an hour, and it was down for a couple days. I was especially productive Thanksgiving day, when almost everyone else went off to visit a temple. It's not very exciting to write formatting requirements for reports, but it beats spending four hours on a bus; I'm about done with long over-land travel. Michael went, and he said it was nice but not worth the long bus ride.

We enjoyed Pondicherry in the evenings. That'll be a separate blog entry when I can link to pictures.

Thanksgiving day ended with a banquet and dance. We went to a different hotel, with a rocky beach by the ocean, with an outdoor dance floor. Michael and I wore traditional Indian dress. I heard several compliments on how handsome Michael looked. Several of us women dresed in saris, though most wore nice salwar kameezes or dresses with knee-length or longer skirts. Most of the men wore Western suit jackets but very few ties. The gay couple were especially handsome in their wedding-fancy kurta pajamas. Everyone mostly stood around and mingled, sipping cocktails and wine, until the food was finally served. Yes, there was turkey, but in a curry sauce. The fish was great though. The dance followed. Nobody danced to the American dance tunes, but almost everyone joined in once they started playing Indian music. I tried some traditional Indian dance moves and apparently kept enough rhythm that Michael didn't recognize me at first, across the dance floor. It was a fun way to wrap up the conference.

By coincidence, this was an auspicious time to have a Fulbright event. Just this week, the Indian overnment signed an agreement with the U.S., to double the number of Fulbright grants to India. The local Deccan newspaper even reported it, and they didn't know we were in town. If you're a teacher or researcher and interested, this is a great year to apply. They haven't increased the publicity much, so your chances of getting in might be better this year (they're currently about one-in-ten for student researchers, and slightly higher for faculty and teachers). They're especially interested in science and technology; nothing in the legislation says so, but it's how the diplomats discussed it. They'll still have plenty of openings for their traditional strengths of English teachers and social/cultural researchers. It's a wonderful experience.

Kerala is a green paradise in South India.  We flew down to Cochi (Kochin) before the fall Fulbright India conference.  More pictures are here: http://blacks.smugmug.com/India/Kerala

We'd booked a custom tour package through Ebenezer Holiday.  I would highly recommend them to anyone traveling through South India. Everything was prepaid and ready for us in advance.  The travel agent personally picked us up at the airport, with his driver. The car was clean and had working safety belts, even in the back seat--the first car in India we've seen with all seat belts working! 

The first day was sightseeing around Cochin, a port city.  The Chinese fishing nets were very interesting, and surrounded by flotsam. 
We saw the seventeenth-century Dutch church. About one-third of the population of Kerala is Christian, especially Roman Catholic. Michael, dressed in his all-white kurta lungi, could even pass for a priest (one shopkeeper thought he was "a Father.")


We also stopped by the local Jewish cemetery and synagogue in "Jew-Town," now an antiques district. The merchants lining the street to the synagogue were on the lookout for rich tourists.  We had to shoo them away constantly.  We decided we didn't want to go back for Shabbat services. We had a fantastic dinner at the Grand Hotel instead--delicious fish and chicken.

The next day, we traveled up to the Kerala backwaters. There are dozens of converted rice barges that now act as luxurious houseboats. We scrambled up the gangplank and spent a leisurely afternoon boating down the river, through palm tree forests and dense floating knots of water hyacinths.  We floated past muddy green fields of rice paddies, which oddly enough are lower than the water level.  Our boat pulled over to a local fisherwoman's hut, and we bought some fish and giant prawns for dinner.  We watched the birds swooping around, and the occasional boat-bus or boat-schoolbus zipping by.  The local people waved at us as they looked up from scrubbing their laundry or bathing in the river.  No nudity inhibitions there.

For the afternoon, the boat pulled over and we relaxed. We dined on succulent ginger-curried fish for lunch, served on banana leaves, of course.  There was a several-hour break for the crew's lunch break.  Michael lounged around and studied Hindi vocabulary, comfortable in his traditional South Indian blue-checked lungi. My husband is so handsome when he dresses up Indian!  I took a little nap. It was so peaceful.

There were many birds, swooping everywhere--and I mean everywhere!  The numerous crows have adapted to living with the people; they followed the women around to filch food scraps from their dishwater.  Three crows even invited themselves to our breakfast the next morning, swooping in as soon as we stood up, and grabbing the toast and eggs while they were still warm. There were plenty of semi-wild ducks and domestic chickens too.  We also saw a kingfisher perching and diving into the water, and some other seabirds that might be terns. I heard lots of frogs, too--bullfrogs, even--but I didn't see them.

Dinner was challenging.  After a picture-perfect sunset, the crew lowered the thick liners to shut the windows (never mind the wide-open doorways).  Michael noticed a little gecko snapping up clouds of flies next to the overhead lights. On closer look, he saw they were mosquitoes. Thousands of mosquitoes.  We don't want to get malaria; however, we didn't want to stink up our bedroom with curry either.  At first I tried duct-taping our mosquito netting to the boat's ceiling, but it was dusty and the tape wouldn't stick.  So I grabbed a couple of the chairs and set them up on the table, then draped our mosquito netting over them to form a canopy.  So under our improvised mosquito-tent, we ate our dinner in the main cabin of the boat.  They cooked us some delicious prawns in a curry coconut sauce.  We retired to our well-sealed bedroom.  The air conditioner drowned out the night noises, but the tightly-shut windows kept out the mosquitoes.

The next day, we traveled up to Wayanad, Kerala.  We passed through tea plantations, and spent the night in the Green Gates Hotel.  Rather, we slept in a bamboo treehouse made into a hotel room.  Green Gates was by far the cleanest, most comfortable room out of all the hotels we have ever stayed in throughout India.  Never mind that we could see through the cracks between the floorboards to the ground far below; that treehouse was a two-story luxury hotel room, with hot water and a comfy down comforter. After a tasty dinner, we snuggled in for a comfortable night's sleep.

The ancient Indus Valley "cradle of civilization" is today an island in a dry sea of salt. Hundreds of miles of salt flats stretch across to Pakistan. It's a barren wasteland that looks eerily similar to snow. We saw it, and tasted it too.

We left very late. Kutch is a five hour drive from our home in north Gujarat. We planned to leave at 8 in the morning. Our driver came by 9. However, his jeep was out of town; it didn't arrive until after 10:30. We ended up leaving at 11. We submitted a ShmooCon abstract to fill the time.

The Great Rann of Kuch looks exactly like a frozen Great Lake in the midwestern USA. But it's *salt*, not snow. This was a great, shallow sea as recently as the time of Alexander the Great. Even now, when it rains in monsoon season, the sea briefly returns and fills with shrimp. Flamingos flock here by the thousands for the shrimp feast, turning pink from the shells. But in the dry winter months, when we visited, the Great Rann is a silent, barren landscape of solid white. Neither plants nor animals nor people live there. We saw only a handful of vehicles - mostly construction equipment. And mostly heading the other way. There aren't any gas stations out there; people mostly use camels or the rare, precious tractor.

If you've ever walked on a snow-covered lake, you have an idea of what Kutch is like. When Lake Michigan freezes over, it's a vast expanse of flat, sparkling white stretching beyond the horizon. Not completely flat; the wind sculpts the snowdrifts into long, horizontal white dunes. With sun or freezing rain, the formations develop a hard, brittle crust that crunches underfoot. Walking on the crust makes footprint craters that break through to the soft snow below. Now imagine that same landscape, but with a 90-degree temperature and absolute still silence. Add a briny ocean smell, and substitute salt for snow. That's Kutch.
We stopped the car and walked on the salt plains. The surface cracked under our feet exactly like frozen snow. We broke off a little bit of the crust and tasted it; natural sea salt. I stayed near the relative stability of the road. My husband wandered over to a pretty, open pool of water, with Yellowstone-like colors from the minerals. The salt crust was thin at the water's edge, and Michael fell in!  He didn't go far, but he sank past his ankles in brine. When he extracted himself, his feet and sandals were completely covered in salt.

We needed the jeep. The sturdy, national highway ended 40 kilometers before Dholavira. The Indian Government was actively doing construction on the lengths on over the salt flats, with a strangely solid, single raised bed. On land, it was another story. We took two hours to travel the last 40 kilometers. After an hour of barely-road travel, our driver suddenly realized he'd passed the last gas station for 200 kilometers and we wouldn't have enough to get back. So he stopped at one of the villages and they poured a can of diesel fuel into the jeep. Whew!

We finally pulled into the Harrapan ruins at about 4:30, the only car in the parking lot. A handful of workers were still sifting through the archeological site with drum-shaped screens.  Other workers were coating the ancient bricks with a slurry of cow manure and mud.  There are huge, elaborate systems of reservoirs created to capture the monsoon rains for use in the dry seasons. Photography was prohibited, since it's an active archeological site.

There's a tiny, year-old museum there too. The workers followed around us, switching on and off the displays of the millenia-old artifacts.  They have found many toys, including carved marble chessmen-like figures and toy carts; pottery; stone and shell beads; and beautifully detailed seals for stamping designs into wax. The seals included several intricate, recognizable designs startling in their lifelike quality. Several seals showed a multi-headed water buffalo--like a bovine Cerberus. Their mundane, single-headed buffalo are today outnumbered by camels and goats in this part of India. The climate changed, and the area became deserted.

We spent the post-Diwali week in Udaipur, Rajasthan, known as the Lake City.  We stayed with Dr. Neelu Ghosh and her family.

Dr. Ghosh and her husband have two charming, intelligent teenage daughters - Ashmika, 17, and Abiditi, age 14.  Their English is impeccable; Michael and I had to adapt our language to not talk down to them.  They're easily the most fluent English-speakers we've met in months.  They're also fluent in Hindi and Bengali, and proficient in Gujarati and Sanskrit.  And they're creative. Their family's home is beautiful, decorated equally in carefully chosen decorations and their daughters' own impressive artworks. And the girls are as nice as they are smart. 

Ashmika and Abiditi showed us around the sights in Udaipur.  We visited Lake Fateh Sagar, an artificial lake/reservoir in the shape of India.  We took a ferry boat out to the Nehru Gardens in the islands in the middle of the lake.  The ferry was packed with (Indian) tourists visiting for their Diwali vacations; it's normally not that crowded.We saw Udaipur's famous fountains. There's the Musical Fountain, an elaborate modern water fountain that plays traditional Rajasthani folk tunes to a sound and matching light show.  It was a little cheesy, but oh well.  The historic Saheliyon-ki-Bari (pictured above) made up for it.