Jungle fever

We went to a Bacardi Jungle party last weekend at the Lodi Garden Restaurant. We got to do a little celeb spotting with Mohammed Kaif in attendance. For other sport ignoramuses like me, he is the heart throb of the Indian cricket team. Chanda even cracked her way into the social pages of the Hindustani Times. The caption reads "THE KISS. Model Ani with friend Chanda. Check out his Abishek Bachchan hair band". The alice band has ARRIVED in Delhi. However many months after Becks started wearing it. Abhishek Bachchan (the even more famous son of Amitabh Bachchan who we saw in Varanasi) followed suit. Now everyone who is anyone is madly unearthing their sisters old alice bands and sporting them with panache.

Haryana happenings

The last 2 days have been SERIOUSLY lllllooooonnnnnnnngggggg. Up at 5.30 and off to the depths of Haryana and travelling up to 12 hours in a day. This may give you the impression that we travelled great distances. This was not necessarily the case. In India, your cruising speed averages at just 50km an hour. The way is constantly thwarted by trucks, top heavy buses and precariously laden, camel pulled trailers. At one point we hit 110km on an open stretch of road and I thought we'd hit 200km at least as my cheeks were being pulled back by the unaccustomed speed.

To preserve one's sanity, numerous stops at road side dhabas (truck stops) for a chai and a paratha (a kind of stuffed roti typically served for breakfast) are required.

At each NGO we visited everyone available would come to attend the meeting until there were 10 or 12 people all seated on plastic garden furniture crammed into a small head office. Piles of dusty paper files reigned with not a computer in site.

Going into the villages themselves was a little like stepping back a century. Women with water pots balanced on their heads gracefully weaved between idle buffalo on the dirt village roads. Without exception we were welcomed into the communities like long lost relatives. Food and drinks were showered upon us. Not accepting these delicacies is considered an offense I discovered when I did not drink my water because I wasn't sure if my Western stomach would be able to handle it. My camera was a big hit and produced much hilarity when they discovered they could see pictures of themselves on the screen.

Haryana women

Life for the women of Haryana is not easy. They are responsible for all the housework; working in the field and of course bearing sons. The productivity of the region is almost entirely a result of the efforts of the women.

A son is of utmost importance. He continues the family line. A daughter on the other hand is a liability. Dowries have to be paid to get her married (a motorbike if the prospective grooom has a year 11 education and a Maruti car if he has a year 12 education) and then there's the cost of the wedding (minimum 50 000 rupees) that is borne by the family of the bride - not exactly affordable for people predominantly engaged in subsistence agriculture. Strange that in Africa it is the other way round and it is the groom that pays lobola for the bride?

There is a strange paradox here between technology and thousand year old mind sets. Foeticide is a HUGE problem here. Women will use technology available to determine the sex of their unborn child and terminate the pregnancy if it is not a male. A colleague that has spent a lot of time working in the area speculated that the average rural women has up to three terminations during her lifetime. As a result Haryana has one of the most disparate men/women population ratios.

A concept unique to India and incredibly effective is that of Self Help Groups (SHGs). NGO driven groups of rural women create a savings scheme together. Monthly they contribute anything from 10 to 100 rupees (about R15). This money is reinvested in financing income generating activities such as candle making or stitching. In addition, the fund provides collateral for women to get loans from microfinance institutions. Women can also take loans from the fund thus circumventing the need to sell their soul to the rapacious village money lender.

The SHG provides morale support to the women but also a high level of accountability - the average default rate for these loans is less than 2%! You may have read aboout SHGs recently as the founder of Grameen Bank, a microfinance institution in Bangladesh, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

As the structure has proved successful it has garnered the all important support of the village men and the rest of the community. SHGs have empowered women financially but more importantly allowed them to become decision makers in their communities.

It is to these women that we are providing further income generating opportunities. We took two phone prototypes with us. Many of the men in the communities have used mobile phones but up to now, the women have been denied access to them. The look of complete delight when two of the women spoke to each other on the phone (a mere two metres apart!) was the highlight of my day.

Jaipur

Jaipur is known as the pink city because in 1876 Maharaja Ram Singh had the entire city painted pink, the colour of hospitality, to welcome the prince of Wales. The tradition has been maintained and they still have very strict rules about keeping it this colour. It's more of a burnt orange in my opinion.

Jaipur is a bit too much of a big city to really fall in love with as I did with Udaipur. Lucky for me I was adopted by Jannu who nominated himself as my official tour guide for the weekend. He is an incredibly charismatic rickshaw driver that has great business savvy. He has differentiated himself from the other guides and drivers through a guest book of sorts in which he has the business cards and comments of his customers.

I was blown away by the Janta Manta, an outdoor observatory of instruments developed by Jai Singh in 1728 that do anything from accurately telling the time to charting the annual progress of the sun through the zodiac.


I went to all the tourist hot spots but my favourite was Hawa Mahal (the palace of wind). Hawa Mahal is a fairy tale palace of icing topped turrets. At the time women were expected to observe very strict purdah. The turrets with the trellised windows were designed to allow them to watch the goings on in the town without being observed from outside.

At the city palace (home of the largest silver receptacle) a pigeon decided to leave an enormous 'welcome to Jaipur' present all over my shorts. I decided to quell the rising irritation and rather take it as a sign of good luck for things to come!

Closing doors

I decided to do a spot of solo travelling this weekend and booked myself a ticket to the pink city of Jaipur leaving at 6am. There was a fatal oversight in my otherwise flawless plan. I had noone to make sure that I woke up at 5am as planned and didn't pull the battery of my cell phone off in my sleep (a useful trick that my body picked up at varsity to cope with one too many late nights).

Running more than half an hour late, I arrived at the station with just 1 minute to get all the way to the opposite side of the station. As I started running, the second flaw in my plan was, shall we say, exposed. I had invested in a pair of Indian balloon pants - perfect for travelling and quite trendy if I dare say so myself (all the backpackers are wearing them). The elastic holding them up was not doing a very good job. The faster I ran, the more stubbornly they slipped down. I hurtled down the stairs and managed to jump on the train as it was slowly chugging away pants clutched in one hand and my bag in the other.