in terms of simplicity.

it's always interesting to talk to people who see a place for a first time. in my experience (and this applies to many things in life i suppose) you don't really see what's right before your eyes. and yet we think we've got it all figured out. my  mother recently brought to my attention that there are various things that i have never blogged about, namely the very basics of life here, so i would like to take this opportunity and catch up on that while i am still here and still have the chance to take pictures of what i'm experiencing.


so for this blog entry i would like to describe to you the very basic and simple ways of living that apply to about 80% of the population here. although newspapers boast about india being the place where 'it's gonna happen', the newly emerging economy and superpower, these headlines only talk about the so-called modernized india. true, go to any major city like bangalore, delhi or chennai and you will find high-tech facilities, jobs, american chain-stores, luxurious restaurants and successful companies that are bound to change the global economy in the years to come. it's always easy to hear about 'slums' in the cities - you know, the poorest of the poor - but the longer i have been here the more i have noticed that those people's lifestyle is in fact not very different from the life people are living in rural areas. if you look at it in terms of labels, i think the indian middle-class doesn't really exist. you either have extremely rich (and i mean EXTREMELY rich people - 4 of the top 10 richest people worldwide are from india!) or poor people, whereas the definition of 'poor' also varies throughout the countries, going from people living out of cardboard boxes to those who at least have a decent supply of electricity. but poor means poor, let's face it. and poverty is everywhere, not just in the slums of delhi.


the region i'm in, so more specifically my village perumalmalai, is quite small with only about 500-1000 people. it's slowly becoming something like a town - largely because it is so close to kodaikanal, the tourist hub, yet still maintains its natural beauty and calmness. what i'm trying to say is that yes, it's a somewhat modernized place, but no, it is by no means what we in the west would call modernized.


let me ask you something. when you think about basic and necessary utilities, what do you think about? water, electricity, a sewage system, garbage disposal, a constant supply of food, a washing machine, a phone, a nice house (i.e. a roof above our heads)..you know, stuff you 'can't live without'. 
when i first came here, i didn't know what to expect because i might as well have ended up living in a small hut without light. it has truly been a privilege to be living inside the montessori school which really provides me with everything i would find at home (NOT INCLUDING 24 straight hours of power). however, i could have also ended up living like a true indian in perumalmalai.


sundays is washing day. there is a curve a couple of meters down from the school where there is a small, blue building with a huge yellow sign. people line up every weekend, bringing the weeks dirty laundry. inside the little blue building, there are three washing machines. for a fee of about 5-10 rupees, you can give them your clothes. every weekend, clothes are laid out on the street and hung up on strings alongside the road. when going from perumalmalai to kodaikanal, you can see endless fields of white sheets, billowing in the wind. let's just not mention exhaust fumes and the resulting accumulation of dirt on the freshly washed clothes. a washing machine is a luxury here. most of the people i know sit by open water and wash their clothes there, sharing a bar of soap between ten. imagine sitting at the mur-river with a weeks worth of dirty clothing :)

the first time i went inside a typical home, i was taken aback and not sure if it was a joke. from what i have seen so far, having more than one room is also considered a luxury. let me summarize it like this: there are four walls and a roof, several rolled up sleeping mats in a corner, a television in the other, and a cooking stove in another. the average size is about 10-20m2 and usually, 3-6 people are living there together. it's interesting how the definition of 'living' varies throughout the world, at least in the west the quality of living depends largely on how nice and big your house is, if you have nice furniture, light.. here, 'living' equals surviving and the house is only used for eating and sleeping. when walking through the village during the day, the doors of houses stand wide open - there is nothing to steal anyway - the people are out working. a house  is something like a shelter here. do you see how wide it is?

if there is enough money, the shelter has a bathroom. if not, which is usually the case, there is a wall of bricks somewhere behind the house behind which people just go to do their business. it is not uncommon for me to leave the school in the morning and to look up only to find a naked child's bottom looking back at me. from the many houses i have been in, only one or two actually had a separate room inside the house - one of them even had tiles, the other just had a hole in the ground and a tap. can you imagine not having a bathroom? 

my grandmother always used to (and still does - with passion) talk about the poor people in the third world who have nothing and whose standard of living we cannot even imagine. they're the ones who would love to eat the food that we let go to waste. i used to always nod and roll my eyes - the rants of an old woman! i understood what she was saying and i felt sorry for those less fortunate, yes, but i did not fully REALIZE it or see it with my own eyes. and this is why i really want to encourage people to travel and to see what it's like in different parts of the world! one can only dream of what we consider basic.


sunday is not only washing day for clothes, but also for the women's long, luscious black hair. of course, tradition says that every woman in tamil nadu (and particularly in this state i have never seen a woman who did not follow exactly this unspoken rule) grows her hair all her life, only cutting it when the husband dies, for example. usually, the hair is in a plaid with jasmin flowers on top to make it smell nice. i didn't understand right away that they only washed their hair once a week. on the weekend, you can walk around the villages and towns and see women sitting with their lovely hair spread out, chatting and waiting for it to dry. even the 80 year-old woman also living at the school has full, long and pitch black, voluminous hair. the trick? coconut oil. mind you, something i would never put in my hair. apparently it works miracles though. and what the women and girls do is they soak it all in oil, make a plaid and that plaid stays the same till it's sunday again. :) the purpose of it all? save water, save money on buying shampoo. by the way..think of all the money we spend on cosmetics and various beauty products..shampoo, conditioner, soap, dye..sigh. this is what it means to have the same hair-do as everyone else. it's just.. practical. long live individualism!

i have one more little snippet of life for you - how farm work is done here, or anything involving fields really. in our world, we have machines to do it all for us, taking care of the harvest, ploughing, fertilizing..whatever you can think of. as it seems, buying a machine like that and maintaining it over the years is costlier than hiring a bunch of coolie (i.e. daily) workers to do it all for you. mostly women, of course. it is not uncommon to go around and to see women carrying huge rocks, or sacks of rice/any harvest on their head. i swear, those things must weigh about 30kgs or so and they all just carry it on their heads (an art i have yet to master, of course). all work is done manually, and i mean ALL work. when you go past a construction site, there are no cranes. everything is done by hand and the only aid is ladders made of bamboo and knotted together by some piece of string (it doesn't just sound dangerous, believe me..). whatever it is, there are no machines involved. no cement-mixers. no tractors (the only ones i've seen were at chennai airport to transport luggage and at festivals, where they were decorated). someone once said it's like in the middle ages, technologically speaking. 

and speaking of technology. yes, everyone has a tv and a cheap mobile phone here, but that's it. no ipods and laptops or normal computers even. no cameras or usb-sticks or walk-mans. no game-boys or play-stations, electric toothbrushes or hairdryers. there's nothing like it. 


it's simple here, yes, but really it's just different. it has certainly made me realize that in order to lead a happy life, you really don't need about 99% of the technicalities and things that supposedly 'make life easier for us'. again. understanding that is not the same as actually realizing it :)