HAPPY

!!!!!!! 

The ACJ Morning Show

Got up super early today to make a guest appearance on a daily news program produced by Asian College of Journalism students in the school's new studio. I came on after an interview with a soccer player, a summary of local and national headlines, and a feature on a local flea market. 

     

Coconut delivery!

On the way home from school today, we pulled over for a coconut break. First, you drink the coconut milk and then, the vendor scoops out the meat with a wedge of the coconut, and hands it back to you to eat. I got to stay in the auto rickshaw while Alphonse passed along my coconut; kind of like a Stewart's Root Beer drive-in! without the milkshakes.   

The Blooming Lotus Formation: A tale of revenge, Kollywood flair and high school esprit de corps

Last night, Chakravyuha, the tragic saga of the war between the war between the Kauravas and Pandavas, came alive on stage at Chettinad Vidyashram High School; but not before students busted some great Kollywood moves in tribute to the Tamil films they've grown up on. Kollywood takes its "K" from Kodambakkam, a

Chennai neighborhood that is home to the Tamil movie industry.

Then, the Mahabharata war began in earnest. On the Abhimanyu, beloved son of Arguna, one of the Pandava brothers, was killed in battle, because he could not find his way out of the Chakravyuha, (aka blooming lotus), a labyrinthine military formation. Had his mother, Subhadra, not fallen asleep one night while he was in utero, he would have been able to hear his father's instructions for exiting the formation. Turns out, though, there was plenty of blame to go around.

Wife to the five Pandavas, Draupadi - who is played by Ridhi, my upstairs neighbor - mourns Abhimanyu's death. 

 "My husbands. When will they ever learn?"

-

                                                            Mighty Arguna's final, futile act of revenge. 

  

Two women in Mylapore

Family on Motorbike

World Chess Championship in Chennai

The second successive defeat, this time with the white pieces, shatters the Indian

After playing to four draws and two defeats to opponent Magnus Carlsen, hometown favorite Viswanathan Anand is on the ropes. An apt metaphor, since most tournament coverage lands on the sports pages. This is a photo from The Hindu of a tournament match, played in a glass cone of silence at the Hyatt Regency, a quick hop from my B&B.

Kolam of the Day

Another South Street work of art appeared this morning after the rain subsided. 

The Digital Hum

   This is Shruti, one of my students, at her post in the Pop-Up Newsroom command center. She's tracking tweets from mobile journalists, (MOJOs), assigned to examine educational options, job opportunities, accessibility and other quality-of-life measures that affect Chennai residents who are "differently abled." 

The MOJO Twitter feed was trending in-country early in the afternoon, but faded a bit under a torrent of tweets by gazillions of Indians who stopped everything to watch cricket god Sachin's final match  on television. 

Pop-Up Newsroom: The Scoop

Tomorrow,  Asian College of Journalism students, including several of mine, will fan out across the city - to orphanages, NGO, playgrounds, the streets, city slums and other locations - and report back to the "Pop-Up Newsroom," a 24-hour new media collaboration with J-schools in California, Taiwan and the UK. Check it out: http://www.csun.edu/mike-curb-arts-media-communication/journalism/news/pop-newsroom-students-take-part-global-project 

You will find me tomorrow afternoon in the ACJ command center, where other students will be reviewing all tweets from the field and retweeting the best @ #livepoverty.              

Chennai and Baltimore: Separated at Birth?

Three recent items in The Hindu, (links below), provide irrefutable evidence that Baltimore has a secret sister city:

1. Chennai residents love crabs. 

2. Chennai residents love Edgar Allan Poe.  

3. Chennai residents (and cricket fans everywhere)  go all out when their sports heroes retire: 

Kolams painted today on South Street

Sunday lunch with Alphonse and his family

Yesterday, Alphonse, the auto rickshaw driver who takes me to and from school, took me to his home for lunch. His wife, brother-in- law, a son and his younger daughter, Grace, awaited. Elder daughter Joy, a school teacher, was out and about. Little brother Emmanuel was at church.


We zigzagged through the city to a street filled with people, goats and a cow, and then a labyrinthine apartment building before coming to Alphonse's place.Two rooms, both open to the elements as well asthe balcony/thoroughfares that wind around the perimeter of each floor. Women hang laundry on the roof. The toilet is a basic WC down the hall.


We sat on the floor and had spicy fish, sambar, a green bean/coconut concoction and a particular kind of short grain rice that costs 150 rupees per kilo, Alphonse said. I brought dessert - brownies.




Alphonse and his family

Grace is enchanting and speaks a tad of English. She greeted me with a big hug and later, after helping to serve lunch and clean up, she asked lots of questions, showed me family photographs, and the keepsakes in her diary, which was punctuated with English phrases and brimmed with photos of her classmates, friends, cousins, and favorite movie star.

                                      

                                        Grace with her roses on the balcony.

The family is Christian and belong to the nearby Rose of Sharon church, which offers services in Tamil, Telegu and English.

At my request, Alphonse sang a Tamil hymn with a bittersweet melody that sounded a bit like an old British or Scottish ballad. It was about all the animals in the forest coming together through the grace of God, Alphonse said.

Grace and her mother, who knows no English, and I chatted through the afternoon, while Alphonse and his son napped on the concrete floor. Then, I hopped into the auto rickshaw and Alphonse took me home.




     Grace and her guest.

Parrot on boy on bike

Painting a prayer to Lakshmi

    Every morning, women wash the entrance to their home and use rice powder to paint a kolam, a visual prayer to Goddess Lakshmi to bring prosperity to the household. Some are simple; others extremely intricate and suggest a higher mathematical power at work.

   Below, two images of a kolam painted on my street this morning (a little worse for wear by noon.)

   

A weekend respite

Lunch last Saturday at Amethyst, a step-back-in-time, (cue the ceiling fans), kind of place, with Fulbright colleagues and their spouses.
 

 

From left: George, (married to Christine and grew up in Chennai); Christine, a  professor of pharmacy teaching at a local university;  Steph; Paul, a professor of double bass who is researching music education; his wife, Ellie.

Bragging on my students

I asked students to read two magazine articles about a tacky Indian reality show called  Splitsvilla  and compare them to a long tribute to the serialized version of the Mahabharata, which first aired decades ago on what was then India's national (and one and only) television station.

 The result? A room full of insights and differing views:

It's wrong to assume that Splitsvilla is evidence of Westernization, or that Westernization is a recent and entirely unfortunate phenomenon. 

Only youth in the country's rural backwaters watch Splitsvilla and aspire to fame and fortune.

No, Splitsvilla's growing popularity exemplifies India's obsession with the United States. That's true, whether you prefer Breaking Bad or Splitsvilla.  


Among the responses were outright challenges to the wisdom of the assignment itself. Some students thought I was asking them to support one extreme or another; in effect forcing them to champion either the old India or the new India.

Students' questions, skepticism and fresh takes on the themes and quality of writing found in these stories are exhilarating and instructive.

On that note, here's a link to a lovely online essay by one of my students:  http://www.sparkthemagazine.com/?p=6443    

The Empire Hobbles Back

                            Charles and Camilla kick off a visit to India with a ceremony on the Ganges.

The Divine and MOM

 

 
My move to India hasn't stopped my father from sending clippings and topic ideas for my class. This week he emailed to suggest I talk about the Mars Orbiter Mission, India's shoe-string project to explore the red planet that was scheduled to launch November 7 from a site about 80 kilometers north of Chennai. Although the mission received coverage, most of it landed well inside most newspapers. Now, it dawns on me that maybe it was a cautionary editorial move, should the mission fail.

 It didn't! And today, MOM's success is front-page news, and includes an account of India's chief rocket scientist's morning visit to a temple where he sought divine help for the mission: He "offered pujas [prayers] at the Tirupati Venkateswara temple, about 100km from the launch pad, with miniature replicas of the rocket and the Mars orbiter spacecraft."

Yesterday, I ventured to Marina Beach (with Alphonse, of course) to see if we could see the launch from afar. Kind of like long-distance viewing of Cape Canaveral launches.

We scanned the north and northwest horizon. Alphonse called his daughter at home to keep track of the countdown. And at 2:38 pm, we spotted a contrail corkscrewing into the sky, disappear behind the clouds and reappear like a little string connecting the clouds as it sped south over the beach. Not a great view. Still, I felt vindicated as most people advised me to watch the launch online or on TV.  This was way more fun and now I can watch a rerun.

We ambled back to the auto rickshaw, and Alphonse started his own countdown: "10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1" and we blasted off to home. Then, I went to yoga!

   Waiting to launch

 Marina Beach pony rides

Scanning the horizon for a bright light

 

A closer view (From The Hindu)

  

 It went that-away!

 

Soaring toward Mars (from The Hindu)

 

After the launch, we tried the fish, deep-fried in a cauldron of boiling oil. Not bad, but Alphonse said it wasn't as fresh as it should be and rushed to get us a Pepsi to prevent any distress. No problems to report..

 





         

International Edition of Family News Nov 3

Steph's @ a kids' concert in Chennai

Henry  & Ben @ the Ravens game in Cleveland

Tom & Katie @ home looking for the boys (see above) in the stands @ the Ravens game

Can't resist

Out Clubbing

Last night, I met Manjula and her husband, D. Krishnan, at the Madras Boat Club, founded in 1867 on the Adyar River. It's an old-school kind of place: Sleek rowing sculls kept under shelter, cricket on TV, friends sending drinks to friends across the bar and Diwali fireworks bursting over the water. 

Krishnan, a photographer, has worked for many years at The Hindu, where he now a photo editor, although he occasionally escapes to remote parts of the country to document lives and traditions that haven't given way to the "New India." He also owns an amazing collection of glass negatives of Chennai when it was Madras from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.. I've spotted prints made from these negatives all over town, including the B&B where I'm staying. 

Here is one of the prints from Krishnan's collection:

And, here is Krishnan's great shot for The Hindu of Ben Johnson not winning the 100 meter race at the 1988 Seoul Olympics:

Twenty-four years later, Krishnan wrote about that photo for The Hindu op-ed page. Here's a snippet: 

The feeling that you get on carefully checking your film when it is still wet and finding that you have got the image that you had planned for gives you a thrill that is not experienced when shooting digital. Yes! I had what I had wanted! Johnson with his right hand up in a sign of victory and Carl Lewis following. I couldn’t wait to make a print and transmit it to my newspaper.

Diwali: The morning after

My street on Sunday morning 

Student revelations

          I discovered today that the Asian College of Journalism has a dedicated space for student essays on Huffington Post. Here's the link to a post by one of my students!

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/the-walls-that-talk_n_4110585.html

Friday night lights, sights and sounds

       Diwali firecrackers and glittering fireworks exploding across the city, next door, down the street. Snap! Crackle! Pop, pop, pop! It's getting personal. A school colleague said she had to stuff cotton in her Golden Retriever's ears and wrap a scarf around his head so he could chill out and sleep during the blitz. "He looked like an idiot," she said. In the morning, he shook it all off.

I'm not stuffing my ears with cotton. Instead, nibbling on sweets gifted by my school colleagues (from Grand Sweets of course) and sketching the mini jungle outside my window unfazed that it's now hidden by the dark.