Archive Page 2
Playing Holi
I’ve been hearing about Holi since I got here. It’s the Festival of Colours and second in significance to Diwali, the Festival of Lights. The rules for “playing” Holi are pretty simple: arm yourself with coloured powder and coloured water, and prepared to get as much as you give. So fun! On neighbourhood streets, at Holi parties, EVERYONE was covered ALL over with colours. The party I was at had a pool. We all got tossed in. Keep in mind that there are a lot of “dry” days in this country — but Holi is not one of them.
paint, paint and more paint. To put on people.. in celebration of Holi!
10 a.m. These kids have been dodging colour canons for hours, apparently.
Holi party.
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Hey everyone. Check out this wicked contest that can help Brent document an important story in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — no one ever talks about disease being a weapon of war, but that’s what’s happening in a place where scores of displaced people are denied access to basic health care.
Vote for his idea!
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Holi — the festival of colours! — is just around the corner and completely unrelated to it, I went out with some pals. Friday it was the Press Club of India, a venerable institution in the heart of the city that I got in to thanks to a journalist friend. It was packed! We just missed a performance by a Belgium musician, but the patio was inviting and we were lucky to snag a table. It didn’t take long for others to join us and we talked politics and society and corruption over beer and vodka. I told them that the hardest part about being new and here has been having to decide (very) quickly who to trust and who to not. One gentlemen told me not to worry so much about cultural differences and to follow my instincts the way I would at home. “I think you know people 50% during that first meeting, then 75% the next couple of times you meet. But you will never know someone 100%.” He impressed upon me that in order to know, I mean REALLY know, a culture, one must read its literature, get to know its thinkers. If I wanted, I could arrange to meet one of Indian’s eminent scholars over tea. Really? Really. The wonderful thing about this place is that it seems like you can meet with anyone. Of course, the journalists were full of recommendations, chief among them The Argumentative Indian, by Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, historian Ramchandra Guha’s India After Gandhi and The Burden of Democracy by Pratap Bhanu Mehta.
On to Saturday and the Olympic sized pool my friend and I had to ourselves. Where were the crowds? 31 degrees Celcius and sunny does not warrant a dip in a pool for Delhites, apparently. It was a lovely afternoon that meandered like the narrow streets we took to my friend’s place in the “village”, a bustling residential and commercial strip among a cluster of more well to do homes. Looking down from her rooftop terrace reminded me of picture books I loved as a child, where the lid of a house was missing and you could see what was happening in each room. We met other friends under a gazebo in a local park, shared a few drinks, wolfed down a couple of kathi rolls and then rolled out, to a posh “farmhouse” party. Don’t think barn or cows; in fact, think the opposite. Delhi farmhouses are large plots of land owned by wealthy families. This was an anniversary party and the drinks were flowing, the food was fabulous. And the Bollywood dancing under the stars was fun! Here’s one of my favourite tracks, from the movie Delhi 6.
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Chai!
Okay! Want to learn how to make Chai?! Follow these easy steps and you’ll never go to Starbucks again. Maybe. I’ll include the recipe at the bottom.
Ingredients! From top left: cinnamon sticks, black peppercorn, brown sugar, tea buds in the teaspoon and a chunk of ginger.
Throw all the spices into a pot of water and bring it to a boil.
Be patient. (That's The Kite Runner.. Really recommend it.)
Add milk and bring to a boil.
Add the tea buds and brown sugar, if you like it sweet.
After it has simmered for a couple of minutes, it's ready.
Recipe
* 4 cups water
* 1 cup milk
* 1 tsp loose black tea (this was weak. I’d put two)
* 3 cinnamon sticks
* 1-inch chunk of raw ginger (thinly sliced)
* 5 whole black peppercorns (I’d put more, to taste)
* 2 whole cloves (I didn’t have this around)
And I added brown sugar to taste.
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An Indo-Canadian in Hyderabad
I met Prabhaker on the shuttle bus that was supposed to take me from Hyderabad to its airport. He looked over his shoulder and asked me where I was from and I told him. Ah! What a coincidence, he said, taking out his Canadian passport. “I lived there for five years with my family. We moved back to India two years ago.” It got a little hairy shortly after that — the bus broke down and, true to form, I had underestimated traffic in a big Indian city.. But Prabhaker acted quickly, spat out a couple of choice words to the bus operators and told me to follow as he dashed out with his bags and got us and another fellow a cab to the airport. It was a long way, plenty of time to get a taste of that quintessential immigrant experience — the one Canadian embassies fail to mention when they hand out Welcome to Canada booklets to hopeful families around the world.
Prabhaker was 37 when he applied for a visa. He was making a decent living in Hyderabad, but thought that Canada could be a better place to raise a family. Cleaner. Less pollution. He has a degree in international trade and was sure he was headed to a land of opportunities when he moved his wife and two kids to Toronto in 2001.
Prabhaker was never able to make more than $37, $38,000 a year, most of the time working in a TD call centre. The family lived in a small apartment by Queen and Lansdowne, eventually rented out part of a house from another Indian family in mid town. He faced that familiar challenge — you need Canadian experience to advance in our system, and you need someone to give you a chance. He found that employers were not so keen to hire an outsider. He said the same would happen in India, where caste divisions continue to limit someone’s professional ascent. People are more comfortable with their own, he said.
After spinning his wheels in Toronto, after working at a gas station to supplement the family income, Prabhaker decided the struggle wasn’t worth it. He reached out to his former employer in Hyderabad and arranged for “more dignified” work as an international sales manager. “The probability of making it big in Canada is the same as making it big here,” he said. Now he owns his own home in Hyderabad. He isn’t chained to a desk at his job, gets to travel abroad. His wife does not have to work. The move has been a good one.
“But I miss things about Toronto.” The Don Valley Parkway’s display of brilliant colours in the fall. The Toronto Zoo. His long walks along the harbourfront, and the ferry ride to Centre Island (the best deal in town!). He could hardly contain his excitement when, on a recent business trip to the United States, he spotted a Tim Hortons (although the small coffee he usually had turned into a medium because, well, that’s what a small looks like in America). He was as addicted to Timmy’s as he was to the Royal Canadian Air Farce; never missed a Friday episode. “You’re more Canadian than me!” I laughed. He laughed, too. He spoke fondly of Jean Chretien. They share a birthday. There are less fond memories, too. Like the time he tried to buy something at Zellers, just as the cashier turned off her light and told him her aisle was closed. After he left he saw her turn the light back on and serve another customer. Those experiences were few and far between, he said; he cherishes Canada. “No hard feelings. This is where we belong.”
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I went to Hyderabad to write about a program to get basic health care to people living in rural villages that have no doctors. A couple pics from the village, population 2330. And then a few more pics from playing tourist for a day.
Through the window of a mobile clinic that visits rural villages in Andhra Pradesh.
Big crowds to get registered for health care.
Centre of the village. That's a Neem Tree, considered holy because of its many uses. It has leaves with antiseptic properties. Or that can be crushed into spices. AND twigs as toothbrushes!
Hyderabad's markets! I'm at the top of the Charminar (another pic below). It's the city's most important monument, built in 1591 to commemorate the end of a plague (although another unofficial story is that it was built for a woman)
Charminar in the distance.
Yes.. this is also India! So drained by all that action that I paid $15 rupees to sit in a quiet, manicured park. Kinda looks like a parts of Wonderland, no?
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Paradise
The auto rickshaws at the bus depot were taking me for a ride with their ridiculous quotes of 700 rupees and 500 rupees and OK, fine, 300 rupees to get to my hotel. So, I went to Paradise instead.
Paradise is a restaurant and its reputation reaches Delhi. THIS is where you go for Biryani, a specialty in the region. I’ve had incredible versions of the rice dish in Delhi, so there was really no need to convince me about tasting something authentic.
Twenty rupees later, I was getting my bags checked by a woman at Paradise’s security point. Took the lift to the second floor, and walked into a large, classically decorated hall. Reminded me a bit of a rooftop Chinese restaurant in Toronto. All the tables were dressed in sand-coloured linen, and decorated with a single, short stemmed rose. I touched its red petals. For once, the decision was easy: chicken biryani, please. The fragrant jasmine rice came in a copper pot. Buried underneath, a quarter chicken. So. Good. To. Eat. Meat! Indian dishes routinely come with onions on the side, and I love it when they’re sliced on an angle that makes it look like a jigsaw puzzle. I relished the fact that it’s OK to use your hands at the table here and pressed the individual layers out and into the rice, kicked it up a notch. The cherry came outside, when I found a rickshaw that took me to my hotel for 70 rupees. So… I win!
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Outsourced to Hyderabad
I don’t have numbers to back me up, but I think it’s safe to say that thousands of young Indians have moved to Hyderabad to work in call centres that deal with complaints from North America. Like Ani, who I sat next to on the bus ride from the airport to Hyderabad (I decided to take the shuttle that cost 150 rupees after a cabbie quoted me 1200. Ha.) Ani looked younger than me, probably in his early twenties. He is from Calcutta, where his father used to run an electronics shop. Ani said he always wanted to be a freelance journalist, and was studying to make that happen, but he couldn’t juggle school work and a full time job. So he quit his studies and moved to Hyderabad, the capital of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh and one of India’s outsourcing hubs, along with Delhi and Bangalore. Ani started with General Electric as a call taker and has since been promoted to quality control. Now he’s part of a team that monitors the call takers, and tells them how to better serve Americans who are bitching about their credit cards. This new job is much better than the last, he says, both financially and psychologically. You can imagine the abuse some of these kids endure from an irate credit card holder.. I’m sure I’ve been on the dialing end. But the money is apparently good for young Indians who are climbing the socio-economic ladder. An entry level call taker earns about 9,000 rupees a month ($225 CAD), but he or she can double that by effectively dealing with customer issues, and also up selling new products. “It’s not about the quantity of calls, but the quality of service that you give,” Ani said. When we got off the bus, he gave me tips on how to avoid getting ripped off on a ride to a hotel.
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