fulbright-nehru research fellowship

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J. William Fulbright was an American senator from the south who fought McCarthyism and the Vietnam War, and in the time in between, set up the Fulbright program in hopes of infusing “a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs.” Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s first prime minister, a man who — in the words of scholar Ananya Vajpeyi — “is himself caught up in the subtle alchemy that transforms him into the leader of all Indians and all Indians into the People of India.”

Their legacies live on in both their countries, and I’m elated to announce I’ll be tapping into that heritage as a Fulbright-Nehru Research Scholar in 2013-14. The funding will allow me to spend five months in India, reporting, researching and writing my first book, Elemental India. To say I’m not quite sure how I would have done it without this support is no small understatement. On behalf of struggling journalists everywhere, I bellow, “Thank you!”

rewriting indian legend

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The Indian woman whose name we don’t yet know is dead. She was twenty-three years old, a medical student who’d gone with her male friend to see a movie at a Delhi mall on the evening of December 16. They stood at the Munirka bus stand, and when a bus pulled up, they stepped onto it. They didn’t realize until it was too late that it was not public transport but a private bus full of joy-riding men. Men who had been drinking. Men who had an iron bar. They used it to beat the man and – along with the weapons they were born with that make them the coveted sex in South Asia – rape the woman so violently that doctors had to remove her intestines. Two weeks after the attack, she died.

This in the land where goddesses’ lyrical names linger in the legends and lore: Lakshmi and Parvati, Durga and Kali, Saraswati and Shakti. They are celebrated and worshipped with holidays, festivals and shrines in their honor across the subcontinent. But little of their divine power seems to translate to ordinary women, who hang lower than their male counterparts on every social tier that is measurable.

Read the rest at the Revealer…

organic chocolate makes transit

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Mott Green aboard the Tres Hombres. photo credit: Fair Transport Company, Holland

I’ve written about the Grenada Chocolate Company before, This latest piece, about their trans-Atlantic wind-powered delivery of chocolate to Europe, was published last month in the print edition of the sailing magazine Cruising World:

Imagine Willy Wonka with a life-long love of sailing, green radical roots, and an anarchist bent and you will begin to get an inkling of what drives Mott Green, one of the founders of the  Grenada Chocolate Company. He and two friends started their small ambitious company in 1998 and have since determinedly stuck to their utopian ideals while creating award-winning organic dark chocolate that has received multiple Academy of Chocolate awards.

First the trio perfected their recipe, carefully crafted from bean-to-bar all on the small West Indian island of Grenada. They refurbished a house into a pastel-hued factory and installed solar panels to power it. To ensure a steady supply of organic cacao, they helped create a cooperative for local farmers, bringing them into the company’s egalitarian folds.

This spring, they realized one more dream that Green had been harboring for years: wind-powered delivery of this “food of the gods.” [Read more…]

“a heritage takes wing” wins best feature story

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Saed Ateq Al Mansori, Falconry Festival, UAE

About a year ago this time, I was in the UAE covering a story about falconry receiving a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage designation. The story, “A Heritage Takes Wing,” was published by Saudi Aramco World magazine, and I recently found out it received an award. My editor sent along this dispatch:

The March/April 2012 Saudi Aramco World cover story on falconry, “A Heritage Takes Wing,” was named Best Feature Article in the Association/Custom/B-to-B magazine division at this year’s annual national magazine contest sponsored by Folio in New York.

Here’s their announcement. While Saudi Aramco World is officially a trade magazine, it reads more like the Smithsonian of the Middle East, with smart, well-reported stories about culture, food, travel, history and the like. And it’s free. Yup. You should most certainly check it out.

sweeping air

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I am overly pragmatic. Each day seems so finite, and there is so much work to do. Big work, made out of endless little work. Schools to construct. Minds to make literate. Wells to dig and water to purify. Inoculations to give and hair to braid and food to feed growing bodies. So many streets to sweep and toilets to build.

Instead, it is time for aarti, the Hindu puja taking place this night, and every night, in hundreds of little temples like this one in Varanasi, India. Someone led me here to this place, tucked into the labyrinth of alleyways behind the Manakarnika Ghat, where bodies are burning. On the way, along the other ghats on the water’s edge, we passed a series of Ganga Aartis – floodlights! amplification! – that attract Indian and foreign tourists alike for the full pilgrimage experience. The masses were stacked on the steps that link city to water and packed into handmade wooden boats just offshore, cameras flashing.But the power went out moments after we passed and we found our way by flashlight to the temple building dimly lit with the inverter’s stored energy.

The Hindu priest is kind, allowing my camera and my curious eyes as I witness the rituals I have watched since I was young. Shiva is the focus here, the stone lingam – more breast than phallus – the centerpiece set in a square of silver embedded into the floor like a pious pit. The priest spends more time in careful preparation for the ritual than it will take to enact it, when three other priests join him and, together their hand bells thunder in unison in rhythm to their chants. As a child, the smell of flowers and fire and the hypnotic sound of the chants would transfix me. Now I can appreciate that this ritual incorporates the five elements into one seamless act. Always I have viscerally loved the moment when, at the end, I can place my cupped hands over the heat of the flame and bring them to my face, my eyes closed.

But I have grown old and I think too much….

Read the rest at The Revelaer.

must india ravage to rise?

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My double book review was just published in Caravan magazine, looking at Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, by Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari, and Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars, Vandana Shiva’s latest. It’s loaded with (unanswerable) questions.

Is there nothing between the sleepy socialism of India’s first decades that admittedly did little to raise the standard of living for most Indians and the sell-out spree of the recent past that has created a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots? What happened in the half-century between political independence gained and economic independence relinquished?

Read the piece here.

 

going underground

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I allowed way too much time for my journey, sure I’d get lost or confused along the way. I wanted to avoid a repeat of last night’s sweaty slow slog in a taxi, stuck in bristling traffic, so why not try the Delhi Metro? I’d only been on once before, a few years ago, when the five-line system was still expanding rapidly across the city. Online, the interactive map helped me figure out where to go, and that my journey would cost 19 Rupees (less than 50 cents). I headed out, and found overhead walkways to get me across the busy main street of Lajpat Nagar, no line to get my token, a quick pass through security, following the cues as everyone tossed their purses and backpacks through the x-ray machine and stepped through the metal detector. A woman in a sari additionally swiped me down with hands and wand. I barely had to break my stride to follow huge signs in Hindi and English leading me where I wanted to go. A broad clean platform had a sign perched above it, telling me it would be 4 minutes til my train arrived.

My friend Rashmi Sadana wrote an ethnography of the Delhi Metro, after she approached it the way one would a foreign land, studying it as its framework was being placed within the existing cityscape. [Read more…]

a nighttime dance

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It’s late in the evening and I return with my friend in her car, driving through the night streets of Delhi. The congestion of the daytime, or even the evening not so long ago, are gone, and the action consolidates around stoplights. At a red light we stop, and a man wipes a rag over our windshield as my friend waves him away. He steps in front of the car, arms up, as another vender selling colorful whirligigs atop sticks passes behind him, bonks him playfully on the head with one of the whirligigs and continues on. To our left, I see a shadow of a woman from the corner of my eye, holding a baby in her arms, just on the other side of my rolled up window. I’ll always wrestle with these moments of naked asking, of naked refusal. [Read more…]