Jaisalmer Jaunt

Jaisalmer’s Old Town, like Venice or Bath, gives the tourist the impression of having stepped into an impressive and gigantic museum diorama. Nearly 1000 years ago, this city—set along the cusp of the Thar Desert—was an important stop along camel trading routes between the Subcontinent and Central Asia. Its distance from Delhi (and its formidable hilltop fort) helped preserve it from military incursions during the Mughal era. Today, Jaisalmer is known as the Golden City—sun-kissed and steamy, raked by desert winds, and caught in a Medieval time warp.

The city’s nickname is apt: Jaisalmer retains a golden hue, the color of perfectly baked crème brulee. This is due to the yellowish sandstone used to build much of the Old Town’s buildings, coupled with the ever-present sunlight that burns down on the city. The foreboding fort stands atop Trikuta Hill, outlined by 99 circular bastions (some of which have been converted into balconies for a boutique hotel). Jaisalmer Fort is unique for Rajasthani forts in that people still live and work inside its walls. Therefore, tourists passing through the fort see school children walking to class along the fort’s narrow stone lanes, observe women hanging laundry from crumbling rooftop eaves, and get hassled by vendors and rickshaw touts who own shops in the shadow of the maharjah’s palace.

Jenna and I spent a day walking around Jaisalmer’s Old Town and taking an audio tour of the palace. Marching to the top of the palace’s battlements, we could easily understand why Jaisalmer likes to brag that its fort was never captured (though most Rajasthani towns make the same claim about their own forts). Jaisalmer sits on a precipitous rise that would have given ancient lookouts unobstructed views across the desert plains, east and north towards Delhi and west towards Persia. Advancing armies could not have ambushed Jaisalmer. The audio tour told us as we stood on the palace’s highest point, “On a clear day, you can see all the way to Pakistan.” Jaisalmer Fort was about as close as I wanted to get, at the moment.

The circuitous lanes around the fort have an inconvenient asymmetry, typical of towns built hundreds of years ago. It is easy to get lost in the tributaries and criss-crossing interstices of these streets. It is equally as easy to step in cow dung, too. Rajasthan is a proudly Hindu state, and cows are a common sight on roads, sidewalks, and highways. Jaisalmer’s cloistered nature makes the cows appear extra large and more numerous than normal. Their droppings dot the streets like digital pins on a GPS display. No coincidence, then, that Jaisalmer smells like you would imagine it smelled like 1000 years ago.

Open sewage is actually a pressing problem in Jaislamer. The fort and Old Town, as originally conceived, was not built to handle the amount of waste that is now produced in its environs. UNESCO reports that the fort is actually sinking on its foundations as its pipes and sewers decay from overuse and lack of maintenance. Open drains line the streets of the Old Town and liquid black sludge gurgles by unappealingly.

It appears as if I am not being kind to Jaisalmer, but we actually enjoyed it immensely. The atmosphere was clear and the air (once you got away from the open sewers) was cleaner than Delhi or Calcutta. Once the sun set, the temperature dropped to a pleasantly mild level that made eating on our hotel’s rooftop terrace enjoyable.

Jaisalmer, at night, makes you feel like the ancient traditions and customs of this region have a direct link to the past. The call to prayer from local mosques, the rhythmic chanting from a Sikh temple, the bells clanging from a Hindu shrine, the nasally whine of a satara flute, the clack of hooves on cobblestone—these sounds waft up to a listener as he surveys the glowing lights of Jaisalmer, surrounded comfortably in a soft blanket of desert darkness. For a moment, he has convinced himself it is 1155, and Jaislamer is brand new.

Jaisalmer Fort from below. If I had been taking this same view 1000 years ago, I most likely would be having boiling oil poured on me and flaming arrows shot at me.

Citizens of Jaisalmer's Old Town, attired in typical Rajasthani fashion. Elaborate (and painful-looking) nose rings are common for women in this region, as are the startlingly bright fabrics that contrast with the dun-colored desert. These women were selling anklets and jewelry outside the fort.

A view of Jaisalmer's Old Town from the uppermost battlement of the City Palace. The twin spires in the center are from a nearby Jain temple. Pakistan looms somewhere on the horizon.

Among the biggest surprises of old Jaisalmer was an Australian-owned restaurant with remarkably authentic apple pie, made from organic ingredients and served with homemade ice cream.

The streets of Jaisalmer's Old Town, with a stone elephant in the foreground. This elephant was a porch decoration in front of an old haveli, a traditional Rajasthani style home for the upper class with an open courtyard in the middle.

A view of Jaisalmer Fort from the rooftop of an old haveli, or mansion. Several havelis draw tourists in Jaisalmer--they are grand, decaying old places with an Old World charm tourists find irresistible.

Ships of the Desert

Jenna and I remain in Udaipur as this country recovers from the euphoria of India's victory over Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup semifinals. Fireworks were going off across the city for 45 minutes after the match ended on Wednesday night. I walked up to the rooftop of our guesthouse and had a perfect view of the cityscape: bursts of red, green, and blue popped up over the buildings and shimmered over Lake Pichola; loud explosions and crackles rent the air ceaselessly; cars honked; children gleefully wailed and screamed.

India now plays Sri Lanka in the final on Saturday night. I wonder how Udaipur's citizens will react if India wins it all.

In a continuing effort to update you on our trip across Rajasthan, I have posted some pictures of a wonderful night Jenna and I spent in the Thar Desert of western Rajasthan, near Jaisalmer.

We rode camels in the evening and had a picturesque view of the sunset over some small sand dunes, looking towards Pakistan (which was a good 40 miles away). We returned to a small hutment where we ate a traditional Rajasthani thali (or sampling of food) and were entertained by a local family of musicians. After that, we rode a camel cart back out to the sandy wilderness and set up cots in the middle of the desert and--quite literally--slept under the stars. I do not ever recall the constellations and Milky Way looking so distinct and multiudinous in America. It was a magical and somewhat uneasy night with the sound of stray dogs howling in the distance and our trusty camel farting and burping nearby.

We woke up the next morning before 5:30 to watch the sunrise. It was an unexplainably eerie feeling to toss aside the blanket, swing our legs over the side of the bed and place our feet directly in soft sand.

I cannot say we had a 'good night's sleep' but it was certainly a memorable experience.

Rise and shine: Jenna waking up after our night spent (trying to) sleep in the desert. It was literally nothing but a cot, a thick blanket, and the stars.

We prepare to mount our camels the previous afternoon. Jenna looks rather stylish. I, on the other hand, look about as conspicuously nerdy as I can get. Still, the floppy hat turned out to be a critical accoutrement to fight the desert sun.

Saya, my trusty camel. I think he was having digestive problems that day. His guttural moans sounded downright prehistoric, a sound from an epoch long past.

Yes, Jenna riding a camel. Handlers walked in front, guiding the camels.. All we had to do was sit on our saddles, grip the pommels, and suffer the bouncing.

Tracks of another camel caravan which passed us during our two-hour journey. It was a common sight to see other groups of tourists out in the scrubland of the Thar Desert. Camel tours are a very big draw for Jaisalmer. Touts offer the so-called safaris on nearly every block of the old town.

Tally-ho! Jenna took this rather romantic-looking shot of me standing on the ridge of a sand dune with the dying sun behind me.

The patriarch of the family of musicians who entertained us in the evening. He is playing a traditional Rajasthani flute, called a satara. It has a distinctive high-pitched whining sound many Westeners would associate with a snake-charmer.

Bikaner...briefly

Jenna and I have had a few whirlwind days around Rajasthan and have been unable to update the blog. We are currently in Udaipur, a city in the southwest part of the state. It is a beautiful place with a lake at its heart, surrounded by low mountains and green hills, much more lush than the rest of this arid state. It is also famous for being the location of the 1970s James Bond film Octopussy. (Hostels around here have the movie on a continuous loop.)

Nearly five days ago, Jenna and I visited Bikaner briefly for one night. Bikaner is a dry, dusty city known for its camel trade. (That was one reason the British never fully subjugated the Bikaner kingdom, for trading purposes.) It was not a wholly memorable town, but the fort was spectacular. Here are some images from our visit.

The mighty Durbar Hall in the fort, a place for public meetings and coronations. This picture does not doe it justice; it was simply one of the most impressive rooms we have seen in our extensive tours of Rajasthani palaces.

Jenna standing in front of a stone lattice screen (or jali), a feature seen frequently in these Rajasthani forts. The screens were constructed so women of the maharajah’s court could walk around the palace without being seen by people standing on the outside.

A board of nails displayed in the fort, used by Hindu mystics more than 100 years ago. They mystics would enter trances and then stand and even dance on the boards and NOT draw blood. My own test proved the nails remain very sharp. (Don’t worry; I have received my tetanus vaccination.)

A beautiful hallway off the maharajah’s bed chambers. A guard allowed Jenna and I to take a peek inside, saying, “No Indians allowed here. Only foreigners.” Of course, he expected a tip for his generosity.

Relaxing in Pushkar

This is a short post, since Jenna and I have been traveling rapidly through several cities over the past few days. Earlier this week, we stopped in Pushkar, a small community in central Rajasthan with a holy lake at its center. There were more than 100 temples in the town. The restaurants ran on strict vegetarian menus, and Pushkar's spiritual aura seemed to attract the wayward neo-hippie set of Western traveler. Still, Jenna and I enjoyed ourselves. Here are some pictures:


Taken from atop a hill near Pushkar. You can see the city vaguely over Jenna's head.










Jenna sunning herself next to Pushkar's holy lake. The buildings looked beautiful in the morning reflected off the serene waters.









A shot of Pushkar over the lake in the morning.

One of many shiva lingams to be seen in Pushkar. If the shape looks rather familiar, it is because the shiva lingam is a...ahem...symbol of fertility to Hindus.

A Day in Jaipur

The facade of Hawa Mahal, Jaipur's most iconic image.

A view from the seventh story of Hawa Mahal, looking out on Jaipur's Old City.

Maybe Maharajah Jai Singh was trying to overcompensate, or he may have really just loved astronomy. This impressive sundial sits at the heart of Jantar Mantar, the observatory park built by Jai Singh in the late 1500s.

Jenna expressed a bit of confusion over how some of the instruments displayed in Jantar Mantar actually worked. To her, it looked more like an exercise park.

The central courtyard of City Palace. The tall cream-colored building in the background is the actual residence of Rajasthan's current maharajah.

A giant silver jug used by a former maharajah to transport holy Ganges water during one of his trips to Europe. It is purported to be the largest silver object in the world.

Standing with a 'guard' at City Palace. After the photo, he leaned over and whispered, "Ten rupees, sir?"

The Rajasthan state flag is made from the flags of the Rajputs’ conquered enemies. Nothing better symbolizes the proud militancy of this state’s fearsome history, a history as bewildering and circuitous as the family tree of any European royal family.

This history came more to life for Jenna and I on our second day traveling through Rajasthan, when we toured through the Old City of Jaipur, the state capital and still the residence of Rajasthan’s royal family. Jaipur’s Old City—more so than Old Delhi or London’s historic City district—is clearly defined by a well-preserved stone wall that surrounds a bustling maze of bazaars and palaces. All the buildings within the Old City are painted a distinctive pink color, giving the city its iconic name: the Pink City. (It is rumored that the Rajput maharajahs who built Jaipur wanted the city to rival Delhi’s famed Red Fort, which was made of red sandstone. However, Rajasthan suffers from a lack of that material, so they built out of normal stone and painted the buildings a color emulating red sandstone.)

Jaipur’s Old City must be overwhelming and chaotic for the hundreds of Western tourists who descend upon her everyday, to tour the historic sites and wade through the many shops and stalls. Luckily, Jenna and I long ago grew accustomed to the sensual overload of an Indian market. Still, Jaipur is a heady conglomeration of sights and sounds.

Not for nothing is the city known as India’s ‘shopping capital’. Cramped little shops the size of American bathrooms line the Old City’s narrow streets. Small alleyways shoot off in arterial sluices and merchandise is thrown literally everywhere—on the sidewalk, in the street, hung upon the walls, stacked atop low stone eaves. It is about as close to ‘one-stop shopping’ as India gets. You can find in Jaipur anything your souvenir-hunting heart would desire: lush Persian rugs, highly polished silver trinkets, necklaces and jewelry made from semiprecious stones, bags and chappals fashioned from camel leather, ornately glazed clay pottery, thick Rajasthani blankets, and pristine white khadi cloth. It is impossible for the novice to tell the difference between what is genuine and what is fake, but it almost does not matter, so different are these products from anything you could find in the West.

Away from the hustle and bustle of the market is the City Palace complex, a sprawling site that Jenna and I visited late in the morning. The Palace’s exhibits told the fascinating story of Jai Singh II, a Rajput ruler who founded Jaipur in the late 1500s and built the palace. It is still home to Rajasthan’s royal family—the aged maharajah, his wife and two adult children. They serve a purely ceremonial role in state politics but still do a lot of charity work around Rajasthan.

Next door to the palace was Jantar Mantar, an odd outdoor park filled with giant Medieval devices used to measure the movement of celestial objects. It was built by Jai Singh II around the same time as the City Palace and resembles a modern-art theme park. A three-story tall triangular tower in the park was used as a giant sundial.

Finally, we stepped through Hawa Mahal, probably Jaipur’s most recognizable structure. From the outside, it is a seven-story tall façade of pink stone, crenellated with windows and pockmarked with stain glass. It looks like a giant pink wedding cake. But from the inside, it is a more complex and substantial palace, which was built in the 1700s specifically for the women of the maharajah’s court. In those days, the women of Rajasthan observed strict purdah. That is, they could not be seen by outsiders…ever. The maharajah of the time built Hawa Mahal as a place for the women of his court to reside in privacy. They could look through the windows and stained glass partitions of Hawa Mahal’s exquisite façade out onto the streets of Jaipur and not fear being observed themselves.

It was a whirlwind day through Jaipur’s historic district. Naturally, we ended it with some shopping. To make Jenna walk through the ‘shopping capital’ of India without stopping to browse and buy would, I think, have been torture.

Rajasthan Road: Amber Fort

A view of Amber Fort's main courtyard--Jaleb Chowk.

Jenna inside Amber Fort with the Diwan-i-Khas in the background.









Emerging from one of the fort's many small passageways.













A view of the fort from the long flight of stone steps leading to the back gate.

Rattlesnakes are not indigenous to India, but if they were, they would most certainly live in Rajasthan. This windswept state southwest of Delhi has the kind of hot, sun-beaten climate that rattlers enjoy in parts of Texas and the American Southwest.

After a wonderful week taking Andres and Celina around Calcutta, Delhi, and Agra, Jenna and I have embarked on a ten-day driving trek through this desert state. Rajasthan is the ancestral home of the warrior Rajputs, an independent breed of Hindu rulers who fought of successive waves of invading Afghans, Mughals and British before finally—and very reluctantly—integrating their princely states into the Indian Republic in 1947. (It helped that the new Indian government allowed the Rajput maharajahs to keep their land and titles.) The Medieval forts that dot the landscape are a remnant of this feudal past, placed everywhere in this dusky landscape like so many red houses on a Monopoly game board.

Jenna and I took a quick five-hour drive from Delhi on Monday to Rajasthan’s capital Jaipur. For this trip, we are driven by Shakir, a Rajasthani native from the lakeside city of Udaipur (another stop later on our tour, made famous by the 1970s James Bond movie Octopussy). Shakir is an amiable man with long wet locks of jet-black hair. He proudly informed us in our first hour of the trip that he has driven all over India.

“Rajasthan…West Bengal…UP…Kerala…Tamil Nadu. All over. I am very good driver. You like me much,” he said with a smile reflected in the rearview mirror.

For our part, Jenna and I were already savoring the feeling of being tourists after five months of living and working steadily in Tirur and nearly another month fretfully dealing with our visa issues, which have now been solved. We booked this trip in a rather impromptu way at our hotel in Delhi, through a soft-spoken Sikh named Chandeep. We were considering just taking trains through Rajasthan but Chandeep’s confident reassurances about his connections in the state convinced us to let him book the car and hotels for us.

“I will get you very good hotels. Comfortable hotels. The driving is easy. You will have the driver at your disposal. Good, reasonable price,” he said in his small tourism office in the first floor of our hotel.

Through one day in Rajasthan, Chandeep has been proven correct. We stopped at Amber Fort, just north of Jaipur on Monday before arriving in the city. To say who this fort was founded by and to what purpose it was used is about as interesting for readers as detailing the lineup and relative batting skills of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers. That is to say, history and the complexity of Rajasthani politics through the years have obscured the necessity for such long-winded explanations. Suffice to say, Amber Fort is a striking example of stone and marble architecture, perched atop a dusky hill overlooking a sprawling valley, well-placed to hold off an attacking foe. In fact, the guidebooks say the fort was never actually captured in more than four centuries of existence.

Amber Fort is a little kid’s paradise. Indian tourism regulations being what they are, most of the fort is unguarded and its intricate pathways, narrow alleys, and maze-like inner chambers are open for any industrious child with an exploratory soul. Several times, I lost Jenna because I found interest in turning through a random doorway or following a winding rampart into a darkened crevice that impossibly had another cavity leading off it. You could spend two full days in Amber Fort simply trying to find your way around.

The place has all the hallmarks of Mughal-era Indian forts—arched gateways with brilliant frescoes, bejeweled marble latticework overhanging windows and vaults, fibrous-looking stone pillars upholding egg-shaped domes. All the necessary parts are here: a Diwan-i-Am (Hall of Public Audience), a beautiful Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of Private Audience), a mosque, private chambers for the rulers, and a well-preserved Char Bagh (Muslim garden broken geometrically into four squares).

Overall, it was an excellent start to our trek through Rajasthan. Shakir met us outside the gate, having spent his time under a large banyan tree with some other drivers. “Too hot today,” he said smiling, as he led us to the car. “But that is Rajasthan. It will always be hot.”

Holi Moly

The festival of Holi is one of India's most anticipated days of the year, especially in the Hindu belt around the national capital Delhi, where it is celebrated with particular fervor. Jenna and I just happened to be in Delhi on Sunday for Holi and, as you can see by the pictures, we got caught up in the colorful excitement. Luckily, we planned ahead: I bought a cheap white shirt just for the occasion and we both wore clothes we were intending on throwing away anyway.

Holi commemorates the start of spring, and Indians of all ages roam the streets throwing brightly colored dye on each other and smearing passers by with dye and sticky paint. Small children (and some big ones, too) even loaded up Super Soakers with colored water and trained their weapons on anyone who dared come within range. It was common to come across bouts of urban warfare between groups of adolescent boys spraying and throwing dye across the alleys at each other.

For the most part, it was a joyous occasion, as locals politely walked up to us and blessed us with orange, pink, teal, and purple dye. Most even hugged us and said, "Happy Holi". Only a few seemed to have lost their manners. Overall, it was an exhilerating experience.

Jenna and I had left Calcutta earlier in the week. Our good friends from Texas, Andres Lopez and Celina Moreno, made a once-of-a-lifetime journey to see us. They met us in Calcutta and then asked if we would go with them to Delhi, so they could see the Taj Mahal. With our visas issues thankfully resolved, we were able to say 'yes'. Gladly, it allowed us to participate in Holi. Unfortunately, Andres and Celina had to leave to catch their flight home at one in the morning of Holi, so they missed the action but were able to see some early starters over the weekend.

Due to Andres's and Celina's visit, I was not able to update the blog regularly over the past couple of weeks. In coming posts, I will be reviewing some of the past week when they were here as well as updating the loyal readers on our new adventure: a driving trek through the desert state of Rajasthan.

Some boys threatened to shoot us with more dye even though we were already saturated, but we convinced them to settle having their picture taken.

It took a mere thirty minutes in the streets for us to look like this--as if we had been inside Willy Wonka's factory when it exploded. The dye came off pretty easily in the shower, though when it mixed together it looked a sickly brown washing down the drain. We still are finding random dyed spots on our skin more than 24 hours after our Holi festivities.

A Tour of Kumartuli

Smaller, more ornamental idols on sale.

A kumar puts together the straw body of an idol. You can see a more complete one over his shoulder.

One of the largest examples of the idols made in Kumartuli, this is the multi-armed goddess Kali--or Durga as she is usually known in Bengali--with the severed heads of her enemies slung around her neck.

A kumar--or potter--slathers mud onto the body of an idol.

Half-completed idols of the goddess Kali (in a less formidable incarnation) stand impassive on a street in Kumartuli.

In America, the word 'Kumar' is usually associated with the cult movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. In Calcutta, the word 'kumar' means potter and denotes the class of men who work year-round making idols for the city's famed pujas, or festivals.

These idols come in call sizes--small enough to be a Christmas ornament and big enough to need several dozen men to carry them. For the bigger idols, their shapes are first fashioned out of straw and tied together with jute strings then slathered with mud taken from the Hooghly River, which is a tributary of the Ganges and is thereby considered holy. These figures are then fired in kilns then extensively decorated with paint, fake hair, jewels, and sequined clothing.

The small, cloistered district in north Calcutta where the potters--or kumars--have plied their trade for centuries is called Kumartuli. This week, I took a walk through the area's narrow alleys and saw the kumars at work. The half-constructed bodies of dozens of idols sat out baking in the noonday sun, while the potters sat in the shade molding more.

I asked one kumar what festival these idols were for and he responded, "The big one: Durga Puja."

"The one in October?" I asked, uncertain that they would be preparing this far in advance.

"Oh yes. That one."

Indeed, they work all year for the gigantic celebration that lasts an entire week and commemorates the end of the monsoons.

Waiting for Superman...And a Whole Lot More

Jenna, in September, teaching at a private school in Calcutta.

Admittedly, I feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle in regards to the debate over American public education that has exploded since Jenna and I came to India more than half a year ago. The release of the documentary Waiting for Superman, the controversy over Michelle Rhee’s dismissal as DC Schools Chancellor, and now the protests in Wisconsin, have all passed us by rather tangentially here in India. (To give you a taste of our perspective, an Indian paper reported a few days ago that teachers were holding “Egypt-style rallies in Wisconsin’s state capitol”; I thought that was taking it a bit far.)

With all that in mind, Jenna and I finally got to see Waiting for Superman earlier this week, when we downloaded it off iTunes. After having heard so much about it on our friends’ Facebook profiles and skimming reviews in the Internet media, we finished watching the movie rather nonplussed. We thought the movie heart-rending for its portrayal of five young children and their families trying to gain admittance to public charter school programs. Yet, we also felt a deep sense of mystification at the movie’s lack of realistic policy solutions.

This blog is not the proper forum, I think, for a more detailed delineation of my thoughts and criticisms of the movie. Yet, I wanted to talk about one point the movie made that gets raised frequently in this ongoing furor over the declining state of American public schools. That is, the fact that America seems to be slipping relative to the rest of the world in academic achievement.

At one point, Waiting for Superman brought up the well-known fact that America suffers in math and science scores in relation to our global competitors. The movie points out that in recent data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the US ranked 25^th in math and 21^st in science scores out of 30 industrialized countries. In the movie, the statistics were accompanied by the requisite stock images of Chinese youngsters doing calisthenics and brainy-looking Indians poring over math problems and microscopes.

First, the images paired with the statistics were disingenuous because China and India were not measured by the OECD’s rankings. However, those two countries are usually identified as America’s stiffest future competition in terms of innovation and economic might. Second, my experiences in India over the past six months led me to immediately question these facts and the polemical motivations behind their presentation.

In our day-to-day lives in India, we have commented frequently about how it is surprising the number of students we see not going to school in India. Beggar children in Calcutta roam the streets asking for change at all hours of the school day. Young kids work busting up rocks on the highways leading to Sikkim. Teenagers help run chai stands and small grocery stores in Kerala. Whether it is because they are socially and economically marginalized or because they simply have begun the necessary cycle of work in a country still building its industrial base, it is distressingly common to see children engaged in activities that take them away from school.

Statistics back up our anecdotal evidence. A World Bank study released in 2009 showed that only 40 percent of Indian adolescents were enrolled in secondary education. Think about that: the majority of Indian teenagers, then, do not go to school. The world average for secondary enrollment at the time of the study was 67 percent. For the United States—the country that engineered the modern system of universal education—gross secondary enrollment stood at 94 percent. (China’s figures, incidentally, showed 76 percent of its teenagers were enrolled in secondary education.)

This was the crux on which my experience broke with the doom-laden statistics I heard on Waiting for Superman. These world rankings get carted out all the time as a way to raise the anxiety and urgency of the debate about what to do about American public schools. In Waiting for Superman, unfortunately, they were also used as a way to blame public schools for the state of America’s academic standing in the world. But I wonder whether the US is being judged fairly, when one of its main rivals does not even enroll most of its teenagers in school.

The tests administered by the OECD to compile the statistics used in Waiting for Superman are administered every three years to a random group of roughly 5,000 15-year-olds in each country. When those tests are administered to Indian children, the lowest (and unluckiest) 60 percent of students—the ones likely to not do so well on a standardized test—are not even enrolled. The results, then, are drawn from the portion of the population of Indian children that are performing at a high enough standard already to have the motivation (and finances) to continue in their education.

In America, nearly every single child is still enrolled in school when they are 15. Therefore, the test measures the results of children drawn from a very diverse socioeconomic spectrum—kids with stable home lives and two college-educated parents to kids who may be practically homeless and living in foster care.

I am still convinced that the latent power (and beauty) of the American public education system lies not in the height of its standardized test scores but in the breadth of its demand that all children go to school. I think this inclusive and democratic philosophy does, indeed, hurt our relative academic rankings. Especially when we are compared to countries and societies that are more homogenous and less equitable than ours. I have seen India’s system first hand, and I can still say I much prefer the American way.

What We've Missed

In our fortnight in Calcutta, I have been able to somewhat reacquaint myself with the news coming out of America. Apparently, some things have changed since Jenna and I were last Stateside.

For instance:

--Newt Gingrich is not only still alive but also thinking of running for President.

--The term ‘bi-winning’ has entered the lexicon thanks to Charlie Sheen.

--The San Antonio Spurs are again the best team in the NBA.

--Lawmakers are actually hiding from their constituencies and refusing to go to work.

--Rahm Emmanuel is mayor of Chicago.

--Jennifer Lopez cries more than Paula Abdul ever did.

--It is considered good news if the unemployment rate is 8.8 percent.

--If you put the letter ‘i’ in front of any word, it automatically becomes cooler. (Think of the word ‘pad’, for example.)

--Steve Carrell is really, truly, honestly not going to be on TV the coming fall season.

--A professor at Northwestern thought it reasonable to have his students watch a live sex act

(even though Monty Python already lampooned that forty years ago.)

--Mark Zuckerberg came up with the most brilliant idea of the dot-com era because he

really, really, really wanted to be cool.

--The most famous singer in the Western world wears raw meat as a fashion statement.

--James Franco was possibly the worst choice for Oscar presenter ever.

--The middle school I used to teach at in Houston, TX, is under threat of being closed.

--More women have joined the NRA than ever before despite the fact that a female member of Congress still lies in a hospital with brain injuries suffered during a shooting rampage.

--Michelle Rhee cannot be mentioned without either the words ‘controversial’ or ‘hard- nosed’ accompanying her name.

--Jenna Bush is a reporter for NBC.

--The Green Bay Packers are Super Bowl champions and Brett Favre may be remembered more for intemperate pictures he took on his cell phone than passing records he accomplished on the field.

--And finally, the prefix ‘wiki’ has become just as overused and annoying as the suffix ‘Gate’.

What has not changed since we left?

--People are still arguing over whether Barack Obama is an American citizen or not.

--And KU still kills MU in basketball.

Despite all that, I am truly and eagerly awaiting our trip home in five weeks.

What I Gave Mohammad Shabeeb...and Vice Versa

A line of beggars outside Nirmal Hrdaya, Mother Teresa's home for the sick and dying.

Nobel laureate VS Naipual grew up in Trinidad and Tobago but had parents of Indian ancestry. In the early 1960s, Naipaul traveled to India for the first time and wrote the memoir An Area of Darkness about the experience. It is a vivid if relentlessly negative portrait of the Subcontinent. Many Indian intellectuals still have not forgiven Naipaul for the largely pessimistic conclusions he drew of their country. (He wrote two more non-fiction books about India, the titles of which accurately capture his feelings: India: A Wounded Civilization and A Million Mutinies Now.)

I cannot say I share Naipaul’s brutal assessment of his ancestral home. My experiences in India have been mostly positive, memorable, and uplifting, though I visited during a different era in time and brought with me a different set of motivations.

Having read parts of An Area of Darkness in the British Council library of Calcutta nearly a week ago, I am still not able to shrug off one comment Naipaul made. It has stuck with me, and it has continued to influence me as I have walked around the streets of Calcutta these past few days.

Naipaul wrote, “India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value. A thousand newcomers to the country before you have seen and said as you…It is your gaze that violates (the poor), your outrage that outrages them. It is your surprise, your anger that denies (them) humanity.”

Though India can by no realistic standard still be considered the ‘poorest country in the world’, the level of poverty in this country is astonishing, especially for visitors coming from the West. In Calcutta, it is especially acute. You cannot walk for very long without encountering a destitute family living on a blanket on the sidewalk, or pass an elderly person sitting hunched over on the curb outside a temple with their wizened palm outstretched and their eyes averted towards the pavement.

Indeed, I have written very little about the poverty I have seen because it is so hard to fathom and comprehend, so troubling to face. You learn a lot about yourself and your own soul walking around Calcutta, and sometimes you do not like what you discover.

Naipaul’s words rang in my ears the other day when Mohammed Shabeeb came up to me and begged five rupees. I was on the south side of the Maidan—Calcutta’s central park—and I saw the small boy up ahead of me, blowing tunelessly on a plastic kazoo. He wore no shirt and had grungy black jeans cut off just below the knee. Of course, he had no shoes, which are a luxury for the poor of India. His skin was grimy and ashy, the dirt creating a sickly gray patina over his body. His hair was unkempt and greasy but put up in a way that, I thought, might be considered fashionable if seen on Justin Bieber or Taylor Laughtner. A dry streak of mucus had crusted over his upper lip.

But his eyes caught me. Brilliant sky blue, effervescent and penetrating. They were the kind of eyes that can convey someone’s emotions without the person having to twitch a single face muscle. Mohammad Shabeeb’s eyes brightened and widened when he saw me coming.

He ran up to me, his small hand outstretched.

“Sir, sir, sir. Saab, saab. Five rupees. Five rupees. Five rupees. Hungry. Food. Hungry. Food. Five rupees,” he said, falling into perfect time with my pace and walking by my hip. He put his hand to his mouth reflexively to mimic the act of eating.

I stopped, and he stopped.

“Apnar nam ki?” I said, having picked up a few Bengali phrases from our guesthouse manager. “What’s your name?”

“Nam? Mohammad Shabeeb. Five rupees. Please. Five rupees.”

“Mohammad. Home?”

Mohammad Shabeeb hesitated. He pointed to an overpass, underneath of which could be seen a shadowy pile of formless bundles and piles of trash.

“Native place? Kothay? Where? Calcutta?” I asked.

Mohammad Shabeeb shook his head. “Bihar,” he said, the name of the province directly west of West Bengal, acknowledged by many social statistics as the poorest province in all of India.

“Bihar. Your mother? Father?”

Mohammad Shabeeb again pointed over to the underpass. “Five rupees,” he said, now smiling, his eyes crystalline in the light. I reached into my pocket and counted out five rupees into his palm.

With the change clinking in his fist, he turned and jetted off towards the underpass and disappeared around its concrete corner.

I had not felt good giving Mohammad Shabeeb my pocket change, nor had I felt bad. So often, giving change to the poor is an indifferent action that, in a city like Calcutta, feels the same as brushing your teeth or tying your shoes. You do it so often it no longer feels like a willful decision. I have viewed on numerous occasions, passers-by in Calcutta dig unthinkingly into their pockets and drop a coin or a five-rupee note into a beggar’s plate without even slowing down their walk or looking left or right.

I had given change to the poor often enough, Mohammad Shabeeb was no different in this regard. But this was the first time I had felt compelled to know more about who I was giving to, and that bothered me. Why now? I thought.

Another book about India entitled Notes From Another India by journalist Jeremy Seabrook, tackles the issue of poverty, but in a more strident way than Naipaul. Seabrook writes: “The myths of the beggars are mostly invented by the well-to-do in order to justify their unwillingness to contemplate their own relationship to poverty—the beggars are syndicated, they are controlled by gangs, parents mutilate their own children at birth in order to make them more effective beggars.”

An interesting point, but one I am still ambivalent about. For every Mohammad Shabeeb, there may very well be a scammer. Just this week I saw a man hobbling through an intersection on a pair of knobby wooden crutches begging from the windows of idling cars. When the light turned green and the cars had sped away, he tucked his crutches neatly under his arm and walked off down the street towards another intersection.

Or there was the man who was dragging himself on his rump through the central aisle of a train in Kerala, tapping on passengers’ knees asking for change. Later, when Jenna and I got off I noticed the same man disembark, this time fully upright with perfectly operable legs carrying him along the platform towards another train.

Mohammad Shabeeb, though, struck me as genuine. And, frankly, my mood on that particular day was fortunate for him. As hateful as the words sound to me, at that moment I was in a giving mood. It may be correct to say that your money would be better spent contributed to a reputable charity or your efforts more effective spent volunteering at a home for the poor. But I feel it is equally correct to say it is possible at times to place a few stray coins into the hands of those weak members of society who have resorted to one of the most degrading tasks on the planet.

This is not an opinion that dawned on me overnight upon reaching India. Visitors to India do not suddenly find a well of goodwill in their souls. Nor do they find that generous part of them shrivel into nothingness either. Mine is an evolving belief that is wrung out of me everyday I go through this country. Some days I think I am correct, and other days I think I am absolutely wrong.

The point is, India forces you to wrestle daily and in extremity with your opinions about how to deal with poverty. It is not a theoretical exercise but a practical regimen. Will you give change to the next beggar who approaches you? Will you look them in the eye? Will you cross the street when you see a homeless family camped out on the sidewalk in front of you? Will you ask the next beggar boy his name and where he is from?

These are not easy questions. In fact, I have answered them all ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at some point on our trip. Like Naipaul, I think it wrong to simply ‘gaze’ at the poor or affect a sense of ‘outrage’ at their plight without taking some action to fix the problem. The question remains, though, how to come to grips with your own conflicted feelings. Do you become aloof and bitter like Naipaul? Do you cry for justice like Seabrook? Do you do what Mother Teresa did in these very streets of Calcutta? That is, give and give and give?

I still do not have a definitive answer. Yet, I hope I am creating one each time I meet a Mohammad Shabeeb, each time I am confronted with the problem, each time I decide anew what my response will be.