Transport in Delhi

I've travelled a bit, well quite a lot really, and have seen manhy cities with bad, congested traffic. There's Manila and Bangkok for starters. In New York and London it's so congested that hardly anything moves. But Delhi traffic is something altogether different. There are as many insane drivers with a death-wish in Delhi as there other in other cities of 17 million people - the difference here is that the traffic actually moves very fast. But don't get the idea that it's all in a straight line. Nothing is straight in India, least of its politicians, but that's another story.

Delhi traffic is completely insane. Where there are lanes marked on the roads, they are perceived as rather dull decorations. Nelson Mandela Marg is supposedly three lanes in each direction, but this doesn't prevent the drivers from squeezing five or six vehicles side-by-side in the carriageway. There are cars, of course, and trucks completely overburdended with their wares. That makes up for three vehicles across. Then add a couple of auto-rickshaws, as in the picture above. Note the number of people in this open-to-the-air vehicle. That still leaves room for a motorbike or two, with multiple passengers, none of them wearing helmets. The women sit side-saddle on these death-machines, gazing serenely about them. If it was me, I would have my fingers dug into the shoulder blades of the driver, all the way up to my knuckles! All these smaller vehicles swerve in and out between the larger ones.

They all move very fast, as I say, except for the ones that don't. You see, Delhi also has animals on the road, in various forms. The photo is of a camel in Delhi. At the top of the page is an ox cart. There are also a few weary-looking horses dragging heavy loads around.

Then of course there are the weary-looking men dragging heavy loads about. Regular readers will note that I have commented on the heat, which even by Delhi standards is excessive this year (five degrees above average the weather bureau says). Well, these hardy men just keep dragging their loads all around Delhi in the debilitating heat. Their endurance is amazing.


For my part, I travel to work via a combination of Metro (underground railway) and bus. I walk to my local Metro station, which is Saket. The photo shows the bright-shiny Metro station at Saket, newly-minted for the Commonwealth Games, just six months late. The Metro is a marvel, by any standard in the world. I've travelled on the Paris Metro, the London Underground and the hideous New York Subway. The Delhi Metro beats 'em all! It is clean, efficient and runs on time. Swipe cards make the commuting so simple, and best of all, it's air-conditioned. It's super-cheap and really frequent. When I get to the Metro station at about 8:30am, it's great. I get a seat all to myself, and I dont' have to touch intimate body parts of strangers. On the other hand, if I'm running late and arrive at, say, 8:40am it's a different story. The Metro is packed! See the photo.

It might seem crowded, but it is nothing compared to the buses. They seem to warp time and space in their ability to squeeze people into confined quarters. After riding the Metro for about 10 minutes, I alight and walk in 40+ heat to the bus station. Now, let me just disabuse any readers of the concept of 'bus depot' that they may have learnt in other cultures. This is India. What it means is that there are at least a hundred people standing by the side of the road, standing on the road itself, sitting under trees and generally forming an enormous gaggle of humanity. Then a bus arrives. Well, 'arrives' is not accurate. The bus slows down and flings its doors open, and everybody sprints to the doors and leaps on. If you're lucky, the bus sometimes actually stops, rather than slows down, but it's not common on my route. I now have amazing skills at leaping on and off moving vehicles.

Once aboard, I purchase a bus pass, which enables me to travel on any bus in Delhi for the day. I pay Rs50 (about $1) and the ticket seller asks my name, which has been transliterated into a bewildering array of versions. Cathy becomes Cappy, Kaphi and my personal favourite, Coffee. I have kept my bus passes, but I think I will have one of them framed. When I first bought a bus pass I didn't realise that they also wanted to know my age. I simply didn't understand the question. So the cheerful ticket seller wrote '25' as my age. He is my new best friend! :-)

So I catch the bus for about 25 minutes to place called Mayapuri Chowk. Here the road is three lanes wide on each carriage way, and the bus just stops in which ever lane its in, usually the middle one. The doors open and all the passengers spill out into the middle of a three-lane carriageway, deftly dodging all the above-mentioned moving mayhem. Last week the chap in front of me stepped off the bus and was promptly run over by a motorbike. After much cursing and swearing, he picked himself up and toddled away. I learnt a useful lesson - when you get off a bus in the middle of a freeway in Delhi, look to the left before alighting.

After surviving alighting from the red bus, I then board a green bus to take me on the final leg of about 6-8 minutes. This local bus is usually incredibly crowded, with bodies pressed into every available space. It's not possible to take a photo in those conditions, since one can't move one's limbs, but the photo on the left shows a practically empty bus. Imagine it with four times as many people in the aisles.
Now I've spent a lot of time in very intimate positions with Indians on buses, frequently with my nose pressed into someone's armpit as they hang onto the strap, and I try to hang onto my dignity. This begs the question: why don't Indians smell? I've been on other crowded transport systems, as mentioned, and travelling in summer is as much an ordeal for the olfactory senses as anything else. But not in India. Nobody smells bad. I have two theories about this. One, posulated by an Indian friend, was that the spices in their food actually make them smell better. Possibly. The other thing that I notice all the time on my daily journeys are that Indians are very, very clean. They wash constantly. If there is an open water source in Delhi, there are men, women and children washing themselves and their clothes. In the slums, men and women cart water by hand and are constantly seen scrubbing their cloths or their children. The photo shows a woman at Mayapuri scrubbing clothes outside her house. So public transport in India may be an assault on one's personal space, but it is not an assault on the other senses. And most importantly, it actually works.

Postscript: Apart from the last one, all the photos on this page were taken by my good friend Bart. As a newbie to India he took many, many photos of things that I am so used to, I didn't even notice. Dank je wel Bartje!

Hot in the City

This blog entry has no photos. Only words can describe the weather in Delhi in summer, and even then ....

I foolishly decided to extend my stay in Delhi until June. My Indian friends told me that in June it would be 'really hot'. For my part, I failed to ask for a definition of 'really hot', or even enquire what 'hot' might mean. Now I know.

For the past two weeks there has not been a day when it has been less than 40°C. And this will continue for two months in all. On Thursday it was 43°C and the weather forecasters cheerfully announced that the temperature is set to rise over the next week. By June it is expected to be 47°C.

Now I've lived in hot climates before. I grew up in Darwin on the north coast of Australia, and spent three years in Alice Springs in the late 1990's, in the middle of one of the world's largest deserts. They were hot, but they were in a developed country with an outstanding infrastructure. Air conditioners and fans abounded. India is not like that, and the slum in which I work could not be further from the efficiency and cleanliness of Australia.

In Mayapuri, the electricity is intermittent, at best. This means that the overhead fans in the classroom only work about half the time. I have to close the classroom door because of the din from the medical clinic waiting room that adjoins it. There is one small window that faces onto a concrete yard. The yard is surrounded by a concrete fence, so there is no breeze. The temperature in the classroom is unbelievable - it might be 50°C - but we all just keep waving our notebooks and ploughing on. The kids are so committed to learning that they just won't stop, no matter what the temperature is. They are amazing.

I have to do a lot of walking between the Asha centre and the various bus stops. I carry three litres of water with me, which is all gone by 3pm. When I drink from the bottles, it feels like drinking directly from the hot tap. I've never seen water heat up like that before. I drink it anyway.

The crazy thing is that I'm used to it all now. When the hot weather struck with a vengeance a few weeks ago, I was knocked about a bit. I would come home from work, have a shower then sleep for an hour and a half. Now, I don't seem to be bothered by the heat. I feel as energetic as ever, and don't need to sleep in the afternoon. Don't get me wrong - I notice the heat. How could I not notice drinking three litres of water, or feeling the sweat pouring out of every pore, or peeling my drenched clothing from my body? But the thing is, it actually doesn't bother me now. I've adapted to drinking water almost as often as I breath, and when the fans go out at Mayapuri I don't even comment - I just pick up something to wave and keep teaching.

Maybe I'm turning Indian! :-)

Postscript: Well I may be turning Indian but I'm not getting any smarter. After writing the above post, I went to the rooftop terrace to hang my washing on the line - it's so hot and windy that it will be dry by the time I finish this update. As I walked across the tiled terrace carrying my basket of washing I suddenly felt intense pain in the soles of my feet - yes folks, I'd gone out in bare feet. I fractically cast about for some shade, but there was none, so I dropped my basket and sprinted back to the stairs, in agony the whole way. I now have burn blisters on the soles of my feet. What a numpty!

Classes in Mayapuri

I've written about teaching in Mayapuri in my blog before. This post is meant as an update. This is my second time teaching the wonderful kids at Mayapuri, and I've enjoyed it even more than last year.

As before, my classroom consists of a room with a tiled floor, on which mats are placed for the students and I to sit. There are no desks or chairs. We are all in bare feet. There is a whiteboard on the wall, and that's about it. Everything else that is used in the classroom is provided by me - pencils, paper, copy books, whiteboard markers, sharpeners, erasers and so on. Luckily, all these things are fairly cheap in India, so even providing all resources for 25 students only costs me an average of about Rs 50 (about $1) each each day.

The classroom was recently painted by a team from Ramsgate in the UK, so if you compare the photo to the ones from last year, you will see it's a lot brighter and fresher this year. The photo shows my intermediate level class doing a worksheet, being helped by Katie. Katie is an English Teaching Volunteer (ETV) in the Jeevan Nagar slum. We've started an informal program to visit each other's classrooms, and Katie was visiting on the day I took this photo.

The photo below shows the computer room, which is adjacent to my classroom. Asha believes that the keys to success in leaving the slums are knowledge of English and computers. Needless to say, for the students in a slum, this is the only access to computers they have, so it is a huge benefit to them. Part of the time the kids just goof off on the computers, like anyone else, watching Bollywood songs on Youtube and googling interesting images. However, many of them work hard to improve their skills. In the photo, the boy in the blue shirt with yellow shoulders is Adesh, and he is teaching himself to touch type. You'll see that his eyes are on the screen but his fingers are on the keyboard. His current typing speed in English in 40 words per minute. Not bad!


The number of students attending English classes has slowly increased, and the level of ability has also spread. Some kids are really quick to learn, and others not so much. So I have now divided my students into three groups, unimaginatively named Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced. In some ways, this has made my life busier, but in other ways it has made it more relaxed.

I now have to prepare lesson plans and resources for three separate classes every day. This is not just a matter of dreaming up what I'm going to teach and jotting down a few notes. Each lesson plan has to be a complete item, with explicit instructions to the teacher and a list of resources required. I then have to make those resources, such as worksheets, tests, song lyrics, vocabulary lists, and so on. This is because I have written the curriculum for all English teaching at Asha , and now I am writing all the lesson plans to go with them. The idea is that new ETVs will receive the lesson plans and resources when they arrive, so that they don't have to re-invent the wheel, and also to ensure some sort of continuity between volunteers. I love the teaching part, but writing all the detailed lesson plans is a bit tedious. However, we have a new ETV called Jenna who has just started teaching at Dr Ambedkar Basti, and she is using the lesson plans. Her feedback has been very positive, so that's encouraging.


Dividing my classes into three has created more work because I now have to write lesson plans for three parts of the curriculum simultaneously, but it has been more relaxing teaching smaller groups of kids, with a more-or-less similar ability. No-one is left behind because they can't understand the lesson, and similarly, no-one is bored stupid because they've learnt it all before. With about ten students in each class, they are much easier to manage, and we all seem to enjoy it more. The photo shows me at the start of a class (today, in fact) when only three students had arrived. These are some of the intermediate boys.

The hardest part was when I initially made the change, trying to explain to the boys that the division was based on English ability, not age or school grade. I kept getting confused boys asking why so-and-so was in this group at the Asha English class, but they were in the same grade at school. Indian schools are extremely rigid and hierarchical, so the idea of streaming by ability was clearly a new one to them.

The kids I teach are extremely motivated, and I've written before about the appalling conditions in which they live. So even though it's 40 degrees every day, and the ceiling fans only work half the time because we only have electricity half the time, and there are no resources and little support, I keep coming back because of the kids. They are so inspiring, and so keen to improve themselves and find a way out of the slum, that it makes all the effort worthwhile.

Navaratri Festival

As you've probably gathered from this blog, India is a land of many festivals. Near my home there are two mandirs (Hindu temples) and whenever there is a festival there are many small shops selling the requisite items for worship, such as brightly coloured cloth and garlands of flowers. It seems to me that there is a festival of one kind or another every second week, much to my delight.

The festival of Navaratri (meaning nine nights) is celebrated four times a year. The biggest version is in October-November, but the March-April one is pretty cool too. There are nine forms of the Mother Goddess, and a different form is worshipped on each of the nine nights. During the festival, households invite nine small girls and one small boy into their homes and ceremonially feed them. The little girls represent the nine forms of the goddess. It's a delight to walk the streets during this time as there are loads of obliging young girls going to various houses to be fed, all dressed in their finest and brightest clothes.


On the last day of Navaratri, huge tents are set up thoughout the city by members of each mandir. They provide free food to everyone, regardless of age and sex. When I walked to my bus stop that day, the tent for the free food was so huge that it completely covered the footpath, forcing all the people going to the bus stop to walk along the road. Mind you, that's not unusual in Delhi, it was just unusual in that particular place!

Because of all the free food being handed out around town, many of the local food vendors in my area simply shut up shop for the day. After all, how could they compete with tasty FREE food being handed out on every street? It was the first time I had ever seen them shut. But then India is full of surprises!

India and the World Cup of Cricket

The World Cup, which was hosted by India (with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as co-hosts) began on 19 February and from that moment on, there seemed to be no other news in the Indian media than cricket. In some ways it was a pleasant diversion from the corruption scandals and murder stories which normally plague the front page of the newspapers. But really, had all of India stopped to focus on this series of games?

It certainly seemed so. When important matches were on, everyone wanted to go home before 2:30pm, when the matches started. On one occasion, there was a foreign visitor to Mayapuri, where I work. The Asha workers literally locked the boys in a room to force them to stay to greet the visitor. They all just wanted to get out, to watch the cricket!

On the day when India was due to play Australia in the quarter-final, I told my boys that they could say anything about the Australian cricket team and they wouldn't get into trouble, but they had to say it in English. This was a huge motivator! One little boy called Anish, grabbed a dictionary and was in fervent discussion (in Hindi) with his classmates, asking for the right English words. Eventually, he stood up and announced in perfect English to the whole class 'Australia is falling apart'. Awesome! I think it was the first complete sentence I'd ever heard Anish speak. All the other boys were very keen to learn this exciting new sentence. I didn't mind - they were learning, after all.

India defeated Australia and (with my abject apologies to Ricky Ponting and his great team), I was glad that they did. In India, the happiness in the air was palpable. It was like the whole nation was taking happy-pills. Total strangers kept asking me in a jocular way if I knew that India had defeated Australia. I did!

On the night when India defeated Pakistan in the semi-final, all of New Delhi (and India) went crazy. There were fireworks in the sky, dancing in the streets, people in mobs marching up and down banging on drums and singing and chanting. It was an amazing night.


In my household, eight people crammed into one bedroom to watch the final match against Sri Lanka. The photo shows some of us, there were more around the corner. It was great fun, especially trying to explain what was going on to the Dutchman, Bart, and the American, Katie. I'm not sure that they were much wiser after the match!

Then, the incredible happened. India defeated Sri Lanka in the final, by six wickets. I thought the semi-final spontaneous celebration was spectacular, but this surpassed it by ten-fold! The fireworks went on for fully two hours after the match ended, as did the wild dancing in the streets. At our local market, a huge crowd of young men gathered, and they sung, and danced, and waved Indian flags. There were several police standing by, holding their lathis (canes for hitting people) but no violence ensured, which was a blessing. The photo shows a small portion of the crowd, with a man carrying an Indian flag while climbing a light pole, and others dancing around him.

In my English class, the boys talked about it all lesson. I didn't mind - they were still learning English!

Toxic Mayapuri

I've been teaching in Mayapuri (again) for the past six weeks, and loving it. I love the teaching, I adore my students, but Mayapuri itself is a toxic waste dump. Now that I have had the opportunity to visit some of the other slums in Delhi, what I had been told about Mayapuri has been confirmed. It is certainly the worst slum in the worst environment of all the slums that Asha is involved with. I've written about Mayapuri before but on my second time here, I've really started to notice how bad this place is for my students and their health, even by Delhi standards. So what's so bad about the environment of Mayapuri?

Well, Mayapuri is an industrial area, chock-full of factories belching every kind of pollutant imaginable into the air. This place was set aside as a non-residential area, but now there are thousands of people living here. I work in the area imaginatively named Mayapuri Industrial Area Phase II. The main role of this place is to take scrap metal, crashed cars, broken bits of machinery and anything else made of metal, then manually smash it into its component parts for re-sale. The smell from the factories, and the piles of burning rubbish that can't be re-sold (like bits of rubber and soft furnishings of wrecked cars) pervades every crack and corner here. The ground is filthy - who knows how many litres of oil and engine grease have seeped into the dirt? When I walk to work from the bus stop, my feet literally turn black - it's not a metaphor. The photo at the top shows the rubbish dump that is in the middle of the street - small kids pick over this pile for anything salvagable. The second photo is of a worker manually smashing a scooter into spare parts.

And it's not just the usual industrial pollutants. As the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is unfolding, I learnt that prior to that incident, the world's worst radiation accident in the previous five years had been at Mayapuri. In April 2010, one person died and seven were critically injured, when radioactive material arrived in Mayapuri for recycling. The material stayed in the shop for six weeks before the death and strange illness of the workers was investigated. Who knows how many people came into contact with the radioactive Cobalt-60, and what the long-term health impact will be? In a place as toxic as Mayapuri, how can the effects of radiation be separated from the effects of every other industrial pollutant known to science? How will my students be affected in the future?


In my previous blog about Mayapuri I showed some photos of the homes in which my students live. Last week I went to visit a worse area, the squalor and filth of which was unbelievable. This area is called Khazan Basti and is regarded by the Mayapuri slum-dwellers as a slum, ironically. The photo shows some of the homes, along with the permanent standing water with the pigs wallowing in it. I took the photo standing on the railway line, which runs right in front of the houses.

One of my brightest students lives here. It's a completely different thing when you see pictures of the world's poorest people on TV and in the newspapers, to when you know them personally, spend time with them every day, know their hopes and dreams and actually see them as people, not just unsettling images. Mayapuri is a sobering place.

And here are some of the people. The little girls are metal pickers - they start working at the age of about four years, dragging a magnet through the dirt around the factories, trying to find the tiniest scraps of metal for re-sale. If they are really successful, they might earn Rs20 (about 50c) in a day. They don't go to school, although their brothers often do. Education is not valued highly in Khazan Basti.

All of this makes the achievement of some of my advanced students even more remarkable. To come from this sort of environment, to not only complete 12 years of school education, but to go on and study at university is an incredible testimony to their powers of concentration and persistence. The environment in which they live is appalling, but their life stories are inspirational, and that's why I go to work every day. I breathe the awful fumes, and cough all the way home on the overcrowded bus, but I keep going back, because they keep wanting to learn. These are amazing people.

Holi

Holi is the famous Indian festival where everybody goes a little bit nuts and throws coloured powder over each other. This year it fell on 19th March and I was a part of the whole craziness. After dressing in a salwar kameez that I had bought just for the occasion (i.e. it cost about $2 so I wasn't going to worry if it was ruined) I eventually went out onto the street in response to several teenagers demanding my presence. Of course, I was immediately hit with all manner of coloured powder, water bombs and indeed a whole bucket of water. I then took revenge on the little munchkins who coloured me up and proceeded to do the same to them. Damn! Some of them are fast, but as my daughters will tell you, old age and treachery beat youth and vigour every time!

We then called Bart down from where he was hiding on the third floor, to greet him with a load of colour and water. He also managed to exact some revenge. The photo shows Bart and I in front of the home we live in, with the crazy labrador Moju peering over the 1st floor balcony.


Sanjeev, who is the head of the household, then invited me to visit some relatives, riding on the back of his vintage Enfield motorbike. The astute observer will note that neither of us wore helmets. We whizzed about the main roads of Delhi, which were completely deserted, as everyone was hanging around their homes throwing coloured powder at each other. It was an exhilarating ride, made even more so by Sanjeev's claim (like so many other drivers in India) that red lights didn't apply to him!

We arrived safely at Sanjeev's cousin's house, and were immediately pelted with water and colour as we were dismounting the motorbike in the street. It was Holi, after all. I was then introduced to another Holi tradition: bhang. Now this is a milk drink with bits of green stuff floating in it. I smelled it and asked if the green stuff was marijuana. No, they said. It's just like alcohol, they said. Drink up, they said. So I did. The photo shows me holding a glass of bhang in one hand and the coloured powder in the other. So we all drank a couple of glasses of bhang and then Sanjeev and I headed back to our house to collect Bart and the kids, and go to a party in the park.


It was after I had had something to eat, and done a few dances to Punjabi music, that I started to feel, well, a bit odd. I hadn't had any alcohol, but started feeling, well, pretty drunk. I asked Sanjeev what bhang actually was. Was it a drug? No, he said, it's just a herb we drink at Holi. Are you sure it's not marijuana, I asked. No, he said, it's just a herb. And then I remembered the Hindi word for marijuana. Is is ganja, I asked. Oh yes, he said, it's ganja. Oh great, I thought. So it all went a bit downhill from there. I was completely stoned and was having trouble working out whether what was happening was real or I was in fact dreaming. The photo shows me sitting with Bart, as I was asking him to reassure me that he was real, and not a dream. He was real, he assured. He was a Dutchman, after all, so he knew a thing or two about cannabis I think (or maybe I dreamed that bit).

After having several completely inane conversations with pillars of the community and trying really hard not to looked stoned, I felt capable of walking again, so Sanjeev and Bart escorted me home. Sanjeev made several phone calls, and I understood enough of his Hindi to know that he was asking people for an antidote to bhang. The answer that they all gave? A shower and a sleep. So that's what I did. After being shown to my room I gave myself a shower, all the while wondering if this was real or a dream. I decided that it was real - after all, why would I dream about showering in Delhi? I'd done that plenty of times before. I then put myself to bed for four hours and woke up refreshed and ready to start the party again.

So if my daughters are reading this, remember what you're Mum told you: never ride a motorbike without a helmet and never take drugs. Unless it's Holi. And you're in Delhi. Then it's OK.
:-)