Hyderabadi Biryani

My next trip was to Hyderabad. It’s a really interesting city, a Muslim capital for a predominantly Hindu state (Andhra Pradesh). It was ruled by a series of Nizams (the local equivalent of a Raj) who had great wealth and culture. With Indian independence in 1947, all these smaller kings (around 400 of them) agreed to give up their rule and join the country. All except for Mir Osman Ali. This last Nizam refused! He was a little crazy. Anyway, he did not succeed in his bid to keep Hyderabad independent (in fact, it was something of a massacre).

The architecture of the city reflects its Moghul past. There are some lovely old buildings around the city and a huge lake that was dug over 400 years ago. Now, Hyderabad is one of India’s high-tech capitals, so when you call for outsourced technical support, you can ask Vijay about the biryani (everyone can know Hyderabadi biryani is very best!)

My visit there was a mixed bag. Here’s the negative:
• I got sick and spent 2 days alone in a flat, too weak to go get food for myself.
• 2 bombs went off and killed 41 people.
• Some other AJWS volunteers were supposed to come and I was SO looking forward to spending time with them, but because of the blasts, they decided to stay up north.
• The initial reason for the trip was to attend a wedding (a family member of an L.A. friend) but for a bunch of reasons, I didn’t get to go. Anitha garu, I hope your granny’s OK and you didn’t lose your job!

OK, now the good things about Hyderabad:
• I read some good novels -- Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry (he’s a master craftsman), Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (kept my interest up through all 900 pages), and a trashy Shoba De novel (the Jackie Collins of Bollywood).
• I bought 2 cute tops from Anokhi, my favorite shop in India.
• I met this great guy at the CD store who helped me buy all kinds of music, from Classical Indian to Asian Underground.
• I found this publishing house, Booksline, that puts out educational materials (in Telegu!) that were totally on target to help with my presentations. I bought the entire set of posters. VERY exciting for me!
• Last, and the opposite of least, I met the Dangoria family.

A neighbor of mine back in LA spent a semester with Devyani Dangoria about 30 years ago. She recommended that I contact her, and I am SO glad that I did. I called Devyani Auntie and told her I am lonely. She immediately sent her nephew Nitin to come fetch me from the other side of the city. Being lonely is just one of the worst possible things in India!

Devyani garu is 74 years old and an obstetrician still working full time. She opened an OB hospital in front of her house and she runs a prenatal clinic there. They do about 150 deliveries a month. But that’s not enough. She also built an OB hospital in Narsapur, a small tribal village about 3 hours from Hyderabad. There’s a nursing home and a nutrition center there, too. They're developing food processing projects that can turn bumper crops into chutneys and sauces for sale.

Naniba’s family story is straight out of a novel. Her father was the chief engineer/architect for the last Nizam! They used to own a very large property on the outskirts of the city. Monkeys would roam around the garden, but now most of the property was sold off and apartment blocks were built. There is a cinema across the street and the city has just engulfed their neighborhood. I guess someday even Narsapur will just be a suburb.

The family was incredibly welcoming and taught me so much about Indian traditions and values. Spending time with the Dangorias redeemed the whole Hyderabad trip for me.

Some other impressions of Hyderabad:
• Trying to explore the city on foot (my favorite way to get to know a city is to wander around, get lost, buy some street food, find myself on the map then get lost again). Walking the city streets in India is incredibly unpleasant. There are no actual sidewalks to speak of, and where one does exist, it’s occupied by vendors, beggars, dogs... The roadsides are full of monsoon rain and mud and cow dung and trash. And the streets are full of scooters, motorcycles, autorickshaws, cars, trucks and buses, all spewing varying shades of exhaust, threading the needle and swerving randomly to avoid potholes and cows.
If you’re stubborn like me, and insist on ‘strolling’, trying to convince yourself that it’s so picturesque, and you’re really enjoying yourself, there will be an endless stream of yellow rickshaws that pull right up to you, honking invitingly. Those are the lazy ones. The ones that really want to be helpful, go ahead and pull right in front of you.
I was ‘enjoying’ walking along the footpath around Hussein Sagar, the man-made lake in the middle of Hyderabad, savoring the smells of rotting trash in water and human excrement, when I read one of the signs posted there. It warned against remaining lakeside for too long, as it can be injurious to your health. Underneath the text, was a picture of a digital clock showing 18 minutes. What can I possibly say about that?
• The sounds of the street floating up through the window – the muezzin call to prayer, and my favorite pushcart vendor calling in a honey-sweet voice “sa-MOOOOO-sa! sa-MOOOOO-sa!”
• A bicycle with a HUGE load of balls captured under a net, brightest rainbow colors, riding down one of the busiest streets in town.
• A sadhu with a long white beard, wearing a bright orange cloth, carrying a beautiful wooden stick, riding pillion on a Vespa.
• The gypsy camps on the outskirts of town. They have camels!
• The ladies wearing 'ninja' burkas, and the blingy outfits you can just glimpse underneath.

Hope you like the pictures. There's Bhavna and Sangita with chocolate chip cookies (is this family a fantasy or what?), Devyani Garu at work in the OR, a Lambada tribal woman, a very 'low birth weight' baby, and Murthy with his processed foods.
This week’s soundtrack is Bally Sagoo, Talvin Singh, and Pandit Ravi Shankar.

Cheeky Possum, Cheeky Monkey

I’ve done a bit of traveling recently, so the next two posts may sound a little "what I did on my summer vacation".
The first trip was with Asha Begum, her 10 year old daughter Yasmin (cheeky possum of the title), and Angela, an Australian social worker who came to volunteer with BREDS. Angela really took a beating, as I did when I first arrived. India tests the coping skills of even the most experienced travelers.

We decided to head for the hills, starting out of Vizag very early in the morning. After about 2 hours in traffic, the congestion and shops of the city faded into cane and paddy fields. Soon the road started rising through many curves, to where the air was clean and cool. There were green slopes around, and a drizzle in the air. The ladies walking along the road here wrap their sarees a little differently. We saw two boys carrying a big bag of custard apples. We bought them for Ramarao’s wife for 10 rupees (25 cents).

We were among the first to arrive at the Bora caves. It was overwhelming to think that they found human remains here dating back 50,000 years. The caves were very dark, the air heavy, the ground wet and slippy from dripping water. The lighting was minimal to begin with, and when the current cut out, it was totally dark. Thank goodness for my little LED. There was a small stone lingam at the top of a rickety staircase and I climbed up to offer a prayer for a friend.

As we left the cave, Asha started snacking on some chips. She should have known better -- there was a sign that said “No eatables”. All of a sudden a monkey shot out of nowhere, landed on her saree skirt, grabbed her bag of chips and scampered up a nearby tree. Here’s a photo of her munching Asha’s chips. The speed of the monkey was incredible, but even moreso because she was carrying a baby on her belly the whole time!

When we got back to the parking lot, there was a big traffic jam. Some folks were warding off the chill with nips of whiskey (10am), and the monkey troops were out in full force. We bought some souvenirs – wild honey collected by the Adivasi folks, some shade-grown, organic coffee, and a bamboo hand-fan to use in the heat back in Patapatnum. We visited the tribal museum (see the killer rat trap foto), a large waterfall (more like a rapid than an actual fall), and the gate of the botanical garden (we were too cold and tired to go in, but that gate was really great!) The best part was that we got to visit Asha’s sister, Shahera, who’s been living up in Araku for the past 3 years.
Next, Hyderabad...

Let's cure malaria using Integrated Pest Management!!

Once upon a time there was a pretty green frog named Swati. Swati liked to eat so many things in her pond, but her favorite snack was mosquito larvae. Then one day, old farmer Chatterjee decided to use pesticides in his rice paddy. When Swati’s babies were born, the tadpoles each had 2 heads and died. Swati was so sad. Then she got a headache and died too.
Now who was there to eat the mosquito larvae?
Was it the mud fish?
Well, the mud fish would be happy to eat the mosquito larvae, but he’s not feeling very well. The pesticides make him sick too!
No one was left to eat the larvae and the mosquitoes increased too much.
Then old farmer Chatterjee’s granddaughter got a fever with great body pains. Suddenly she had a seizure was brought to hospital in Srikakulam. The doctors say she has cerebral malaria! This is too, too bad.


Oh the tangled web we weave. So, the frogs and this certain mudfish used to keep the malaria mosquitoes under control by eating the mosquito larvae. But then agricultural pesticides came into use, and destroyed many of these larvivorous species. Without these natural control mechanisms, malaria became rampant. So the government mounted a DDT spray campaign, which worked well… for a while. But what we see often in this situation is a rebound mosquito population even bigger than the original. We also see that mosquitoes develop resistance to the effects of DDT.

And DDT has effects on creatures besides mosquitoes. Birds and fish, for instance. It tends to kill them. Rachel Carson wrote about all this back in 1962, in her landmark book Silent Spring. Since then, evidence is accumulating that DDT has serious effects in humans, as well. DDT is one of the POP's (persistent organic pesticide) we hear about in the news. It is a fat-soluble organochlorine insecticide and it accumulates in fat tissue, such as the breast, and becomes concentrated in mother’s milk. It can have neurotoxic effects in children, and increases risk of breast cancer 5 fold, according to some studies.

Worldwide, malaria kills about 3 million people every year. The statistics alone are impressive, but there’s so much that they just don’t convey. A pretty common scenario is for somebody in a family to get sick with fever at least every couple of months. The fever may be malaria or not, but usually the doctor treats any fever lasting more than a few days because the odds are so high. The fever is incredibly painful to experience, and scary to witness. You feel so helpless. Children miss school, adults miss work. The financial burden of missed work and medical expenses is really significant. This is the kind of ongoing drain on the time and health and capacity of people here that’s difficult to quantify.

The proportions of the tragedy definitely warrant some risks, possibly even the use of toxins like DDT, but we get stuck in these arguments without seeing that entirely different approaches are possible. The other major intervention advocated by groups like the World Health Organization is pesticide-impregnated mosquito nets. They sound like a great idea, but here, you just suffocate inside them. It’s impossible to sleep under these nets (and breath at the same time), and so nobody would use them, even if they were supplied free of charge.
So what CAN we do?

Integrated pest management makes sense to me. This is a system based on the understanding that living systems are complicated and the fundamental principle of life is BALANCE. Generally, it doesn’t work to eliminate a species, even if it is a dastardly one like the mosquito. Instead we work with the natural systems that maintain a favorable equilibrium. This way, we’re less likely to mess up big and do something like feed DDT to babies.

There are lots of methods at our disposal -- natural predators and parasites, complementary crops that increase pest-resistance, physical techniques like mulch and compost, cultural practices, etc. All the principles of permaculture are relevant. We can shift our paradigm from the false binary thinking of good/evil, kill/be killed, and instead use our ecological wisdom to increase the strength of the whole system, and reduce or eliminate the use of chemical inputs.

I found an interesting article about a project in Karnataka where they actually eliminated Anopheles mosquitoes from the community within a year of introducing Poecilia reticulata fish into the wells and streams. Of course this needs to be done carefully because these are non-native species. I’ll be talking about these ideas when I give the infectious disease training module. Hopefully it will spark some enthusiasm in the field workers and we can start to develop a project of our own in this area.

Sometimes, the most powerful ways of affecting health don’t have much to do with medicine.

I’m going to Hyderabad soon for a visit, hopefully I’ll have some nice pictures for the next entry.

Comfort Foods

I grew up on an interesting mix of comfort foods: rice and beans on the one hand, cholent and chicken soup on the other. The other night I literally dreamt about (California style) Mexican food with heaps of sweet and juicy heirloom tomato cubes and gorgeous green chunks of velvety ripe avocado. Steaming handmade tortillas with frijoles and melted salty cheese ….

Now I’ve discovered a new comfort food: pongal. It’s a breakfast food that’s relatively mild. Usually breakfast food in the South includes pungent chutneys and spicy curries. They’re served with some kind of bread, like idli (steamed cake of fermented rice flour), dosa (crispy over-sized crepe made from gram flour) or puri (flaky chewy fried little round). Lunch and dinner always include rice and dhal, along with some kind of vegetable curry.

So what’s my new favorite food made from? Well, rice and dhal, of course. But in pongal they’re cooked together so it has this texture that’s like… baby food. In fact, it’s just like kichedee, which is the first food that Indian mothers give to their babies. I love it. Madam cooks it with garlic, mustard seed, curry leaves and only a little chili. I like it mixed with curd (but then, what don’t I like topped with yogurt?)

Well, as much as I love pongal, I was getting ready to join a cult after so many days of rice and dhal (with the occasional garnish of banana curry, egg curry, curry curry) when I was unexpectedly served some very interesting food. First, was mutton. That just means meat. No idea what kind, probably goat. Hopefully goat. I was honestly afraid to ask.

Then, madam kept wanting me to try this other dish called junnu. It looked so odd. Spongy and tan. I asked if it was sweet and she said no. But it was, so I saved it for dessert and ended up really liking it. Turns out, it’s colostrum! It comes from a cow in the first 3 days after she’s calved. It’s cooked by steaming so it’s like a flan, and it’s flavored with jaggery (that reduced cane juice). So it’s like a super-food! Packed with nutrition. And it’s tastes really nice.

I’m still preparing the teaching modules which means a lot of time at the computer. I loaded my mac with podcasts before I came, so while I wait for the internet, I listen to Science Friday with Ira Flato, Visionary Activist with Caroline Casey, and KQED’s Forum with the brilliant Michael Krazny. Good thing I loaded up because the internet is too slow to download any new ones.

My room at the girl’s hostel is great, but things get very loud around here at midnight. I’m not sure why, but it happens every night! I think it’s when they put away their books and just relax for a while before bed. The building is all concrete block, open hallways around a central courtyard, so noises resonate and there’s no way to sleep through it, and I hear them shouting to each other, "Puspa!! Aparna!!". Here’s a picture of my stuff in my room at the hostel (Jana, notice your pillow – I use it every night!), and some pictures from a recent excursion into Parlakmendhi, where I bought my train ticket to Hyderabad. There’s a shot of the pan wallah, the juice wallah, and the Gokul ad and the King’s house are especially for D. The king was in town, and I was issued an invitation to visit him the next day, but it rained and I couldn’t make it.

AND…. A big shout out to Clara Dorothy. Well done little girl (Man, that was fast!), and Happy, Happy Birthday! We’re all SO glad you’re here.

Back to School

I’ve been staying at the BREDS office, which has been pretty nice. It’s a simple room with a view of the rice paddies out the window. There’s a TV and an air conditioner. Neither of them work, but they’re big and make for good furniture. A few species of lizards to keep me company and some dogs to steal my chappals (flip flops) every now and then (no shoes indoors). Chinnamuru manages to make the curries spicy even though I say no chili, and I get to practice my Telegu greetings with BREDS staffers daily. I’ve never seen brighter smiles or more graceful greetings than here.

One day, Sir told me I am moving to the girl’s hostel at JITM, a small college across the border in Orissa. (Sir is Ramakrishna Raju, the head of BREDS. Everyone just calls him Sir). And the next day I ‘shifted’. Sir lives on campus at the faculty housing (he lectures at the CSREM college next door) and his wife is in their apartment all day, cooking 3 meals. Both their boys are away at school, so I expect she’s a little bored. She doesn’t speak any English, but somehow we manage to communicate a little, I treat her herniated lumbar disc with Su Jok, and we laugh over the hammy Hindi TV serials (soap operas).

When I first moved in, they were constructing a building behind the hostel, but no road reached there, so they had to carry bricks and plaster and rebar through the girl’s hostel. Most of the workers were females who carried their loads in wide, shallow bowls on their heads. Lines of ladies in sarees, heads loaded high, would wend their way through the ground floor of the building. They seemed very interested in looking at me and despite their loads, would step out of the way to watch me go by. One even managed a head wobble greeting from under a huge sack of cement.

There is internet available more frequently here, so I can use some online resources to research and prepare the trainings, and correspond with some experts who may be able to help future projects. The plan is basically to save the environment, rescue humanity from poverty and disease. I should be done in another few weeks.

Here are pictures of the local laundromat and the ox-wash.
Soundtrack: Khaled and KanYe this week!