Terps

Aside from me and Shachi and Ashika, there are 6 students here from the University of Maryland. It's good that they're here. There are 5 girls, named Erika, Jessica, Katlin, Ingrid, and Sara. Also there is one guy, named Jeremy. We're pretty much buddies. He's also my roommate. Everyone else here is coming from India.

One more thing. We have an office at CASP!! It's on the third floor. We have our own desks, and fan and light in the office, and every day a lady brings us coffee or tea. Here's a picture of us in the office:

Transcend

...on a lighter note, I got an mp3 player yesterday. It's pretty nice. It has 2GB. This is what it looks like:

I got it because my CD player broke when it hit the floor after falling out of my bed while I was sleeping. There's this electronics market called Pentameneka or something. The market is three stories high, and most of the places there sell cell phones. It features the first escelator in Cochin, which was pretty awesome to ride on. There's one going up and one going down. I rode on both of them. Other than that the weekend has been pretty uneventful. Well, my roommate and I did go to the bar last night with another student, Libin. That was fun. It was pooring on the way there and the street looked like a river.

"N-deal"

Have you ever heard about this? I know I hadn't. It's big news here, and it's actually an interesting issue. The current government might collapse because of it. If World War III was a T-Rex, this would be the ripples in the glass of water on the dashboard!!!

NEW DELHI: Unrelenting in its opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal, the CPM
has blamed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for triggering and prolonging the
political crisis over the contentious issue. In a signed article in the latest
issue of party organ 'People's Democracy', CPM general secretary Prakash Karat
has written that the cause for plunging the country into a political crisis once
again "lies squarely in PM's renewed bid to go to the IAEA" to get the deal
approved.
...The schedule set by the US, Karat said, was "impelling the PM
to go ahead regardless of the consequences". The reason for the urgency was "the
insistence of the Bush administration that India complete the procedures for the
safeguards agreement with the IAEA so that the Americans can take the step of
formally initiating the process in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to get the waiver
for nuclear trade with India", he said.

This is what's going on: the main party in the ruling coalition (Congress) and some others in the coalition are working out a deal to get material from the US to set up some nuclear power plants. But some parties in the coalition don't like the plan, because they say it would give the US too much control over India's supply of energy, and would have too much influence over India because of it. They want to see another deal go through with Iran, which would involve a fuel pipeline from Iran to India and Pakistan. Apparently they think that if India has to be energy dependent, it's better off depending on Iran. For some reason they don't seem concerned about letting Iran control India's fuel supply. Here's a Pakistan perspective:

As articulated over and over again, one of the chief reasons for the US dangling
of the nuclear deal to India was to tuck India into a strategic partnership to
suit the geopolitical aims of the global hegemon. And that of course meant that
India could be used in a web of relationships that would be positioned in
opposition to whomever the US sees as a threat in the Asian region. And it does
not take too much brainpower to realise that rising economic powers China in
east/ southern Asia and Iran in west Asia are seen as the primary poles of
opposition to American hegemony in the continent. As such, the Americans have an
intertwined relationship with the Chinese, with the latter’s manufacturing base
dependent upon the purchasing power of the former and the former servicing its
economy despite huge fiscal deficits through Chinese holding of US treasury
bonds...

So basically, the parties that want stronger ties with the US support the nuclear deal, while the parties that want stronger ties with Iran like the pipeline. Something's got to give.

Meanwhile. the day after we got here there was a national strike of transit workers. They were striking against an increase in the price of gas. A few weeks ago we visited this waterfall area. It was pretty scenic. They want to build a dam up the river, which would stop the waterfall, as well as the river that a bunch of farmers in the area depend on for irrigation. There are a series of communities and villages along a 20 kilometer stretch of the river that would be hurt by the dam, and the forests world dry up, too. On the bright side, the dam would supple 1 hour of electricity per day to a few hundred households. We visited the area with an economist who has been working to organize people in the area to do nonviolent protests against the dam, because it would take away their source livelihood. They've actually been protesting the issue for 6 years. For the past 100-some days they've been holding a sit-in at the entrance to the waterfall park, in an effort to raise awareness. So far only the local media has taken note. Yesterday they announced that there would be nightly 1-hour power outages because the monsoons haven't brought enough rain to fill the reservoirs to power the generators, etc.

Art Deco

I left Ann Arbor on May 31st. On my way here I got stuck at the Newark airport for a couple days. One complication led to another, which led to me in New York, looking up at the Empire State Building. The building has these etched art deco patterns that you don't see until you're up close, like in the picture below that I didn’t take. It's sort of old-fashioned and modern at the same time.


I'd talk about how that's also a good description of India, “old fashioned and modern at the same time,” because that would make this post more on topic. But I'm not sure that it is a good description of India. The truth is that I like art deco architecture, and that has nothing at all to do with India. But now I'm up to two posts!

First Post Ever

I set this blog up when I first got here, and haven't used it since. Yesterday I was riding in a car. It was the typical, stop and go, near misses with huge dump trucks decked out like pinball machines, etc. We passed by some of those concrete and rebar structures could either be buildings under construction or long since abandoned. I was watching the auto rickshaw in front of us as it weaved in and out of oncoming traffic, then onto the shoulder for a bit, then back in front of us, and I got a weird feeling. At first I thought it was the prescription cough medicine the pharmacy down the street had sold me for 40 rupees. They told I should take it with food, but we had to leave at 6 in the morning, so I had missed breakfast. …but then it dawned on me. I noticed that everything I was looking at was starting to look kind of normal. That made me think about how I’ve been in India for a month now, and then I remembered that I had set this blog up, and thought that if I was going to do anything with it, I ought to get started. So here it goes...

I was in that car because we were visiting a branch office of the United India Insurance company in Thrissur, in Kerala. We took the train there in the morning, and had a pretty busy day. We also visited a beneficiary of the micro life insurance scheme we're working on, to get some input on a survey we're creating to help CASP get a better idea of the beneficiaries' perceptions of the program, presented some program monitoring tools we created for a microcredit-type program, and visited a hospital where CASP is running another program. Actually, CASP has a lot going on in the area. It's also running a medical camp and a child sponsorship project. It wasn't the first time we'd gone to Thrissur. We took the train there two weeks ago, too. That's when I took this video: