India - Days 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6!

     Wow. I have been a TERRIBLE blogger and I appologize for that. Not that I actaully expect many people to be waiting eagerly for my posts, but still, I said I would try to post every day, and here we are on day 6 and I haven't posted once. Whoopsies. Anyway, now I will got caught up with all 7 days that I missed! Here goes!

Day 0 (8/27-8/28)

     This was our travel day, so it was pretty uneventful. My flight left Seattle for Paris at about 2:30PM. We arrived in Paris around 10AM and left for Mumbai about an hour later - just enough time to stretch our legs, get some food, and get back on another 9 hour flight. Between Seattle and Paris I only slept about an hour, but between Paris and Mumbai I think I was only awake for about an hour, which was nice. We landed in Mumbai pretty late, got through customs, and took a van to the Fariyas Hotel - our Mumbai home. By the time we got to the hotel, it was about 3am, and we had to be up bright and early for our tour of Mumbai, so we went straight to bed. My roommate for Mumbai, Shannon, was already in bed.

Day 1 (8/29) - Mumbai Magic and Akanksha

     Our first day in Mumbai!! Unfortunately, only about half of our group was with us, due to flights through Newark getting cancelled due to Hurricane Irene. The 12 of us who did make it to India on time met at breakfast and got our introduction from Deepa, the founder of Mumbai Magic tours. After listening to her story for a bit, we loaded the bus and started our tour. We first stopped at the Gateway to India, which is just a couple of blocks from our hotel. We could also see the Taj Mahal Hotel from here. Next up was the Crawford Market, a huge produce market selling any type of vegetable, fruit, or grain you could want. The colors and smells were amazing. We also stopped at the Victoria train station, the a Jain temple, and the Hanging Gardens. We had lunch at a delicious Goan restaurant called Soul Fry, where the food just didn't stop coming.

     Next up was the Akanksha Foundation, which is the non-profit that Mumbai Magic is partnered with. Akanksha runs a network of schools and centers for children from low-income areas. The centers are after school programs, and as a whole the foundation focuses on leadership development, English, and math skills. We met with Shaheen Mistra, who founded Akanksha and a few years ago left it to help establish Teach for India, which is essentially Teach for America in India, and is in it's third year. Shaheen was very inspiring and has clearly made a huge impact in her education-based efforts throughout India. We also talked to Poorvi Shah, who runs Akanksha's Learning to Lead leadership development program; Shweta, an Akanksha student; and a Teach for India fellow who just started his first year teaching here. Overall, the visit was really great, and I would have loved to spend more time talking to all of the people there.

     By the time we got back to the hotel, it was about 6:30PM. A group of us then got mindi (henna) done, which was awesome. The woman who did it did an amazing job, and it was only like $2 for each of us. Mine looked like an elephant, with an eye at the bottom corner and going up as a trunk to my fingertip. I'll have pictures posted later, and I think we're going to try to get it done again when we come back to Mumbai, since what I have now is already faded. By the time we finished with that, we were all exhausted, and went to bed. My first impressions of Mumbai were that it was very rainy (yay monsoon season!), full of color,  and extraordinarily diverse (even in a diverse number of ways). 

Day 2 (8/30) - ICICI and Swadhaar

     Tuesday! We woke up, got dressed in our business formal clothes and left for ICICI Bank. Once there, we listened to a woman whose name I forgot speak about how ICICI approaches diversity and women in the workplace. ICICI in particular is an interesting place to discuss these issues, because after the economic reforms in the early 90s, ICICI was a small bank that didn't pay as much as other banks, so a lot of men didn't want to work there. Because of this, they hired a lot of women who worked their way up in the company and became top executives at both ICICI and across the backing industry. This has made it so that banking industry here is run by tons of women. The presentation from them was a little strange - they were VERY adamant that they don't see gender or treat women any differently or anything. It just seemed like they were trying very hard to convince us that they had solved all sexism within their company and that no men were resentful about women having so much power. Overall it does seem like their company is better than most as far as flexible maternity leave (and paternity leave!), among other things. I'm not particularly interested in the banking industry so it wasn't my favorite visit so far, but it was interesting. We ate lunch with ICICI from a conference room on the top floor of their building that overlooked a slum, which was an interesting contrast.

     We has some time between ICICI and our next visit, so we stopped a market and did our first bit of shopping. I bought a necklace with an elephant on it for 125 rupees (about $2.75). My first bartering experience! Other people bought way more stuff, but I took it easy.

     Next was Swadhaar - an urban microfinance company. This visit was really interesting; applying a system that has worked so well in rural areas to urban areas causes all sorts of unique challenges that Swadhaar is working to resolve. Swadhaar is actually a for-profit organization, which I found interesting. Their whole deal is that companies should just exist and then incorporate social responsibility as an after thought, but rather all companies should have a responsible basis. Unfortunately, this visit was in a hotel conference room that was freezing cold, so it was a little hard to focus. After their presentation, we had some snacks (they feed us EVERYWHERE here) and then had a discussion about our day's visits. We then headed back to the hotel, and I think some people went out shopping on the causeway but I went to bed.

Day 3 (8/31) - Spencer Stuart, Mall, and Networking

     I woke up a little sick on this morning. I got downstairs for breakfast, had a couple bites, and then threw up soon after, which made me slightly terrified I was going to be sick all day. Fortunately, the day went uphill from there and I was fine for the rest of the day.

     Our day started with Spencer Stuart, a corporate recruiting agency. The woman who led the meeting actually originally studied engineering, then moved to non-profit work, and somehow ended up working where she does now. This visit was pretty fun because the India Spencer Stuart office employs many more women than men, so we met with a few women and actually got into a hilarious conversation about how they had to teach one of the men in their office how to make sandwiches (jokes ensued).

     After Spencer Stuart, we went to the Phoenix Mills mall for a while, which was like half South Coast Plaza and half Buena Park Mall (sorry non-OC friends, this won't really make sense). I bought a tunic-type shirt and a store called Pantaloons (which is fun to say) and had lunch with Pam, our co-leader. Other than that I just kind of wandered around the mall and enjoyed the AC.

     Next up was a networking event organized by a man who grew up in India, graduated from UW and 1961, and has lived and worked in India since. There were a bunch of businessy people there that I didn't really talk to, since I spent most of time talking to Poorvi (from Akanksha) about education. There was, of course, food there, and my conversation with Poorvi, Pam, and a couple other group members was really great. We mainly talked about methods for decreasing the huge education gap.

     The day pretty much ended there; we went back to the hotel, briefly explored the causeway (market), and I went to bed. I am pretty sure this was the night I discovered CSI plays on the hotel room TV. Score.

Day 4 (9/1) - Ganesh Day!

   We got this day completely off, since it was the first day of the 10 day long celebration of the god Ganesh's birthday. What to do with a free day in Mumbai? Shopping! We headed to the causeway at about 11, and I did a ton of shopping. I bought some stuff for myself, but mostly gifts. A group of us found a little restaurant where we got some lunch, and then headed back to the hotel for a nap. After the nap, we walked down to the Gateway of India, which was PACKED. We went into the Taj Mahal hotel, which was gorgeous, and bought some postcards there. Then we were going to venture towards the Prince of Wales museum, but got distracted by a cafe, and ended up spending about 2 hours there and then headed back to the hotel. Not too much happened this day, since it wasn't packed full of visits like most of our days. It was cool to see people celebrating Ganesh, and we say a few different shrines set up for the god.

Day 5 (9/2) - Laughter Yoga and TEDxNarimanPoint

    This post is copy and pasted from our group blog.

                Hello once again from Mumbai! Yesterday (Thursday, Sept 2), we got up bright and early to leave for laughter yoga at 6:45am. We walked down to the Gateway of India and got started. The session lasted about 20-30 minutes and involved stretching various body parts (eyes, neck, shoulders, etc), and then practiced different laughs from India and around the world. The American laugh involved knee-slapping, the Danish laugh had us covering our mouth, and the Mexican laugh consisted of high-pitched tongue roll. The laughter was definitely contagious and we had quite a crowd gathered around us, and one Indian man even joined us in the exercises.

                After yoga, we came back to the hotel to eat breakfast and get ready for the rest of the day. Most of the group went to Film City for the day, but Pam and I stayed back so that we could to go to the TEDx talk on transforming education. We didn’t have to leave until the afternoon, so I had the morning to myself. I ventured out for lunch, to a little restaurant a couple blocks from the hotel. I had butter chicken and butter cheese naan, which was delicious. TEDx was absolutely amazing, and I am so grateful that Poorvi from the Akanksha Foundation gave Pam and me the opportunity to attend the event. There were some really amazing speakers there, and a group of students from Akanksha performed a skit about perceptions of slum kids versus their realities. The whole event really inspired me and solidified my belief that education is one of the most important starting points for decreasing the gap between rich and poor, both here in India and in the United States.

                I jotted down some quotes that I felt were inspiring:

-“I had to learn not to feel guilty or conflicted about the differences between my world and theirs” –Anjali Sabnain, Akanksha teacher

-“Never set a bar for yourself, because when you achieve it, you stop pushing. You stagnate.” – Jyoti Reddy, Akanksha student

-“I feel no less than a kid from privileged background, so why do people expect less?” – Jyoti Reddy, Akanksha student

-“To know your mind for the sake of knowing your mind… is that really the journey?” – Nandita Das, Children’s Film Society of India

-“Discrimination from strangers is unfortunate, but when it comes from within, it is painful.” – Akanksha student performance

Day 6 (9/3) - Dharavi Slum Tour

     I'm finally caught up to today! The Dharavi slum tour. This slum is the largest in Asia, housing over a million Mumbai residents (it's also where Slumdog Millionaire took place). These "slum-dwellers" live in tightly packed conditions, often with onlyt a 10ft x 10ft home for a family of 4. What really surprised me about the slum is rather than it just being a ton of people living in poverty, it was a huge group of people living as basically their own city within a city. The mass amount of commerce that takes place there really impressed me. There are recycling plants, that take plastic from bottles and other materials, wash them, melt them down, dye them, and shape them into the pellets that are then molded into a huge variety of plastic products. There are leather shops, that treat the animal hides from start to finish and export products all over the world. There was pottery, aluminum recycling, schools, a mosque, and government. I wasn't really shocked by the living conditions, but rather by how the residents are able to live despite their living conditions. I was really surprised to learn that even once people have flats (given to them by the government as part of the slum rehabilitation program) they choose to continue living in the slums because that's where their community and history is. Overall the slum tour was better than I thought it would be - I went into it with pretty negative expectations, because I felt like paying to walk around someone's neighborhood is probably exploitative. I still haven't fully abandoned those feelings, but they aren't as strong as they were before the tour. The tour company we went through actually uses their profits to run a school in the slums.

    After the slum tour, we took the train back to the area where we're staying and had a delicious tali-style lunch (again, SO much food). We also all got these amazing deserts at a bakery/ice cream shop next to the restaurant. Since then, we've just been hanging out at the hotel. I did some laundry, and am now watching some Bollywood music videos while I write this. I need to start packing, since tomorrow morning at 5 we leave for Ahmedebad! Tomorrow we see Gandhi's Ashram and have our first meeting with SEWA.

Well that's all for now! I'm not sure how much I'll be able to post throughout the rest of the trip, but I at least got the first week done. Good night!