The Month of September

Aga Khan Palace

The Plan: Take the day off to visit the Aga Khan Palace and hang out with friends

Wow! So it’s been a while since we’ve updated all of you on what’s been happening here in India, and all the blame must go to school work!! We’ve been hard at work trying to finish our “education” (**cough cough**). On one of our few day off in the last month, we decided to head over to the Aga Khan Palace with Aisha and Kara to check out the final resting place of Mahatma Gandhi himself!

The girls came to meet us at our hotel where we had a quick breakfast at the restaurant across the street before heading out for the day. We all packed into a rickshaw (really really tight squeeze but if Indians can do it, so can we!!) and headed over to the memorial. The memorial itself is set in 6.5 hectares of beautiful gardens across a river. Once you cross the gates and enter the grounds, peace totally surrounds you. You cannot hear the noise of the traffic or people talking or dogs barking…it’s actually quite spectacular and a much needed break from the noise pollution we get assaulted with on a daily basis!

So for those of you who don’t know, here’s a bit of history of the Memorial itself. After the Mahatma delivered hi momentous “Quit India” resolution in 1942, the British interned him and other leaders of India’s Independence movement here for nearly two years. Both he and his wife, as well as his secretary for 35 year, were imprisoned here and his wife and secretary both spent their last living days here as well. All of their ashes are kept in a memorial shrine in the garden. The shrines themselves are nothing spectacular (compared to what he did and represented to India and all over the world) and the garden where they are situated is very simple. It is a wonderful place to find peace and quiet and sit a moment and think how one person can impress such change on a whole country. We all stayed there for a while thinking and doing our own thing before leaving the garden and exploring the rest of the grounds. We spent a couple of hours just soaking in the peacefulness of it all before throwing ourselves in the craziness that was Laxmi Rd during the Ganesh Festival!


Ganesh Festival

Plan: experience the greatness that is the Ganesh Festival in Pune.

During the month of September, we were treated to the spectacle that is the Ganesh Chaturthi. As luck would have it, this festival is celebrated with the most fervor in Pune. For 10 days, Hindus celebrate the birth of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, by displaying beautiful clay idols of him all over the city. On the final day, a smaller version of the idol is paraded through the streets before being ceremoniously immersed into the city’s rivers.
In the area around our hotel, we noticed large displays being put up on the main streets, with smaller ones interspersed everywhere else. It seems the idol display is a point of pride for all residents, with each family, street, neighborhood, and area of the city trying to outdo all others.

No two displays were ever the same. On the main street near our hotel, one display had the Ganesh idol at its center, with multi-colored lights forming larger and larger circles around it. At night, music would blast from speakers while the lights would flicker, form patterns, and change colors – red, yellow, green, blue, purple… A second display across the street included a large fountain. Here too at night we’d be treated to a light and sound show, with water shooting out from the fountain in various shapes and forms, twisting in circles, always following the beat of the music. The music, by the way, was a techno mix of Hindi that made you feel like you’d just stepped into an Indian rave. Neighborhood kids would gather here at night, chatting among friends, and taking in the sounds and lights.

Better than any club you could ever go to! With all the lights and loud music going and every display trying to outdo each other, it was even hard to have a conversation…in the open streets!

Already impressed with these displays, Vaishali told us the real show was in the downtown area, where large temples had been constructed just for this occasion and beautiful idols were adorned with silver and gold jewelry. After visiting Aga Khan Palace, we headed for Laxmi Road with Kara and Aisha. We weren’t disappointed. Our rickshaw driver dropped us off at one end of the road, and for the next few hours, we made our way through the bustling crowd. Stands on both sides of the road sold all the typical goods we’ve come to expect in India: jewelry, sandals, clothes, toys, watches, offerings for the temples, and so on. A few times, someone would catch us by surprise, dab red powder on our forehead and then ask for money (they were blessing us, but then asking for offerings for doing so…even after we told them no…multiple times!). And of course, no walk through an Indian city would be complete without poor children pulling at your hands, following you for several minutes, begging for money, and reminding you just how fortunate you are to come from Canada.

The temples Vaishali told us about were more than we could have hoped for. They were beautifully decorated, several stories high, and guarded by large (albeit plastic) elephants (These temples were HUGE…and only constructed for the 10 day of the festival, impressive to say the least!). One had a pot in the middle of a fountain. From all sides, people would make a wish, take aim, and hope that their change would land into the pot. My air ball was quite embarrassing.

These temples weren’t simply for decoration either. Each had a beautiful Ganesh idol inside, with
large processions of people entering the temple to make an offering to the god (both religious – through flowers and coconuts and financial – one Ganesh was literally covered with Rupee bills by the end of the festival). After several hours of exploring and one brief separation (either I was abandoned or got lost depending on who you believe) (There he goes again! We were all waiting for him IN FRONT OF THE TEMPLE! And it’s not like 3 white girls are very hard to find in India!) later, we headed home for the evening, but vowed to come back at night to see it all over again.

A few days later, we did just that, hopping into a rickshaw and making our way downtown at night. The second visit was well worth it because at night, the temples were beautifully lit, as were the Ganesh displays across the area. If you don’t believe us, check out the Facebook album!

Finally on the last day of the festival, we spent the day watching processions of people walking by our hotel, making their way down to the river at the end of the road. Sometimes it was just one person holding a small idol, sometimes an entire family chanting the festival’s mantra – “come again next year”. This festival isn’t just reserved for families though, as large groups (usually a class or club) also made their way down, typically accompanied by a large truck or tractor pulling a platform with several large idols. These groups also made it a little more difficult to see the religious component of the festival, since it really seemed more like just a good excuse to throw a party, blast some music, get drunk, and dance around.

(In the front of their truck, walls of speakers were blasting music, not just one, but usually 2-3 huge speakers!)

I was able to experience that first hand at one point. As Emilie and I made our way to the river to check out the immersion ceremony, a group of guys grabbed me and pulled me into their circle. It didn’t take long to smell the alcohol. While it certainly helped them dance creatively, it also made it pretty hard for me to keep up. Thankfully at one point as they started getting a little rowdier, one of the sober ones pulled me out of there and escorted me back to Em.
I happily enjoyed the view from the sidewalk!

The riverside was filled with groups of people preparing their idols for immersion, decorating them with flowers, performing the proper chants, and then selecting a member of the group to take the idol into the water. One memorable sight was that of a father explaining to his son how to properly immerse the idol for the first time. From what we understanding, while chanting the mantra, the idol is dunked under the water three times, the final time completely, ensuring it won’t float back up, and then letting the current take the idol on its way.

The one unfortunate result of this whole festival is the large amount of pollution it creates. Not only were the idols left in the water, but people would simply throw everything they had brought with them into the water too. This environmental impact is starting to get noticed though and we even read some articles about various initiatives, such as using large tanks to immerse the idols, which could then be properly disposed of. Overall though, it was a very memorable cultural experience we won’t soon forget and we were very happy to have seen it!

Hell Day at School

The plan: Definitely not the day we actually had!

We’ve been working hard at trying to get an education for the past month but that’s been quite the feat. Between professors not showing up to classes or when they did show up they didn’t teach anything we were a bit (and by this I mean VERY) frustrated…but it’s all part of the experience right!! But we had one very frustrating Saturday where we got a bunch of “bad” news all at once which increased our frustration with anything related to any type of administration.

This frustration that erupted on this particular Saturday was actually a culmination of what happened a little earlier in the week. During the week (about 1 month before school ends) we finally received all the instruction for our evaluation. Not only were we to do written exams, but the professors of each of our classes would be responsible for deciding how we were going to be evaluated. So as of the end of that week, we had finally received all the instruction from the professors. So let’s take a quick look at the tasks that were awaiting us for the following month:

Labour Laws: Write a comparative paper between Canadian and Indian Labour Laws. Now this isn’t bad, he didn’t specify the length and wanted it to be a group effort so that each of our sections would complement each other and create a general overview of the topics seen in class. He also later threw a presentation at us, the day before it was to be done, but since the paper was almost done by that time, we already had the necessary material.

Human Rights and International Law: This Professor wanted us to each write a 5000 word paper as well as do a 15 minute presentation on topics he chose for us…ok, it’s still doable at this point

International Economic Law: This class is taught by the same professor as our Human Rights class…he ALSO wanted a 5000 page paper and a 15 minute presentation for this class…this is definitely getting to be a lot of work.

Environmental Law: We have yet to have any directions from her. She handed us her card at some point with a note to call her…but when we did she did not answer her phone, so we figured we’d catch her during the next class…to which she did not show up since she had a guest speaker…so we called her again and she told us to come meet her on Sunday….OUR ONLY DAY OFF!! We told her we had plans and that we would meet with her at our next class. During the next class we spoke to her about it and told us that she would give the directions for our evaluation to Ms. Sakhalkar and that she would transmit it to us…weird but nothing is done conventionally here so we accepted it! The next day, we went to meet with Ms. Sakhalkar to ask for the directions and she told us that she had given them back to our professor and she would be responsible for giving it to us…well finally we got the information and it consisted of a 15-20 minutes presentation…at least we didn’t have a paper to write!!

So it turns out that we would have 4 weeks to prepare 4 presentations each, write 10 000 words as well as another paper…

So at the end of the week, on this “special” Saturday, we had a meeting with Ms. Sakhalkar, the woman in charge of international students at ILS. So already feel stressed from the workload they just gave us, she announces that our exams will only be on the 26-29 of October!! So a bit of background on this…when we first registered, we were supposed to be done our exams on the third week of September but then, Swine Flu hit the college and extended school by 2 weeks…so technically this means that our exams should end at the beginning of the second week of October…still fine with us. While discussing our schedule, we mentioned this to her as well as the fact that we had travel plans and she seemed sympathetic and we had agreed that we would do the exams around the 14th of October since after this, it would be Diwali (a Holiday), but now, it was being extended till the end!!! We tried to discuss the dates with her, telling her that we did not need that much time to study and that we would like to do them before but she refused to even listen to us and told us that the decision was taken by the principal and a body of professors and it was final! We tried to level with her but at this point, she has the nerves to tell us that we shouldn’t take this so lightly…this coming from a school where profs don’t show up half the time and when they do, they teach nothing and where the students either sleep or read the newspaper in class! Wow…

She also added to our workload by stating that we also needed to do 2 other 15 minute presentations; one on a Supreme Court of India case and the other on a current topic of importance…AND we would need to attend a court hearing, write a report and do another presentation on what we learned during the hearing!!

We took a rickshaw home that afternoon feeling very frustrated and angry knowing that we would have to write, on average, one paper a week and try to do the best quality job we can in that time frame…but luckily for us, the night ended with a get together where we met some real nice people who eventually became our friends and who we try to meet up with as often as we can. After this, we realized that there was no point in us being frustrated and ruining the beauty that is India with our mood…we would just have to suck it up and write our papers…and modify our trip a little!! Since we had some downtime between our presentations to Ms. Sakhalkar and our exams, we decided that once school was done, we’d head off to the beaches of Goa and work on our presentations there, come back in time to do them and then head back again to visit Rajasthan before completing our exams and leaving Pune for good! I think we did a pretty good job of making the best of this frustrating situation.



Lonavla

The Plan: Day trip to Lonavla with Aisha.

After having spent the past couple of weeks stuck in Pune because of school work, we felt we needed to take a day trip somewhere nearby to cheer us up and to allow us to experience even more of India…so scouring through our trusty Lonely Planet guide we found just the place: Lonavla.

Lonavla is another “hill resort” about 2 hours from Pune with nothing much to see in town, but it certainly does have one great attraction: Cave Temples! So, agreeing on our next destination, Aisha, Yan and I left at 8 am that morning to go to the travel agency to buy our tickets. Thinking it left every hour, we were a bit surprised to learn that the next bus only left at 10:30 but made the best of the time we had and decided to go find a place to have breakfast. Most stores were closed but we did manage to find a cake shop that was opened and so we bought ourselves some snacks for the trip over and visited the area around the bus stop. Once we did get on the bus and were well on our way, we were lucky enough to be able to watch a complimentary Bollywood movie and though it was in Hindi, it was very entertaining to watch!

We were dropped off in a very vacant area of Lonavla, a sort of road stop along the highway that basically consisted of a restaurant. It being noon, we decided to eat there before heading on our excursion. Aisha and I walked up to the man at the counter and asked him if we could sit down to eat…after which he proceeded to show us a menu…entirely in Hindi! After he explained to us what each thing was (they only served about 8 different things) we each picked something and sat down to eat. After a quick lunch, we decided to take a rickshaw that would bring us to visit both Karla and Bhaja caves.

We had a good time bartering with the driver for a trip to both locations and back to the bus stand, waiting times included. We settled on 400 rupees (approx. $10) and a 50 rupee tip if we were happy at the end. Which leads to my travel lesson of the day, whenever you’re paying someone for a service here and negotiating a price, it’s not a bad idea to mention a “tip” if you’re happy at the end. This will keep the person motivated to provide you good and happy service along the way, which it certainly did here!

Both these cave temples date back from around the 2nd century BC and are among the oldest and finest example of early Buddhist rock temple art in India. Although they definitely weren’t on the same scale as Ellora or Ajanta, there was nobody there and so we had the caves all to ourselves!! It was also a lot less commercialized…but probably not for long!

As we were making our way to the first set of caves, the Karla caves, the rain started pouring down…and only really ended once we made it safely back to our hotel in Pune…

This was not a lot of fun, but it’s been the only day during our entire trip when rain was an issue. Sure there was a lot of it, it became cold, and my $20 Zeller waterproof watch broke, but we survived!

The Karla cave is the largest early Buddhist chaitya in India. It was completed in 80 BC and is around 40m long and 15m high. The cave was carved by monks and artisans from the rock in imitation of other wooden architecture and the details involved in the making of these temples are truly incredible. There is a semi-circular window that filters in light towards the caves representation of Buddha. The cave’s roof is also ribbed with teak beams which are apparently the original beams that were put in place during the construction of the temple. Each of the pillars in the temple is also carved at the top with either elephants or horses. In front of the cave, they recently built a temple that attracted some worshippers while we were there…we even saw some chickens being blessed (not much fun for them when they’re about to get eaten) but besides them and the guards, the caves were pretty much empty and so we had a lot of peace and quiet in a country where it is always hard to find some!

After a little bit of shopping at some stands along the way, we made our way back to the rickshaw and headed to the second set of caves, the Bhaja Caves. The setting here is much greener and quieter than the other caves, with a waterfall on the way and no temple here to block the view! Although most of the caves date back to the same time period as the Karla caves, Cave number 12 actually dates back earlier than Karla and contains a simple dagoba. It started pouring hard again at this point and although we tried our best to stay dry, at one point it just became useless and we got out from the shelter of the caves and just kept visiting as if it was actually sunny.

After finishing the visit, we decided to take the train back to save some money…so we got dropped off at the train station and bought our tickets. Just as the train was pulling in, we realized that they had only given us 2 tickets…not 3!! And so Yan had to run over to buy a new one and we needed to wait another hour for the next train! After being soaked for more than 3 hours, we were cold and tired but still tried to make the best of it!!

By making the best of it, she means getting crapped on by crows. So we were all sitting there under the cover of a roof, waiting for our train, when Aisha looks at my shorts, points and says “You have a stain there.” Just as I look down to see where she’s point to, warm oozy bird doodoo splatters on my hand (a centimeter to the left and I would’ve had an even bigger stain on my shorts. Well that was just gross but lucky for me I had the rain to wash my hand off with.

Once we got on the train, second class, we realized that it was actually more like a zoo! People pushed and shoved each other to get in and out of the train or even to get a seat! A little insane but quite the experience!

This was one of my personal highlights for this trip since at the beginning of the ride, I got to stand at an open doorway watching the Indian scenery go by and listening to MIA’s Paper Planes, the theme song to any India Trip.

With open windows and doors, you can really get a great view of the country side! After a couple of hours, a nice man on the train told us when we should get off and after 5 hours of being soaked to the bone, we finally made it home after another rickshaw ride in the rain!