Christmas Wedding in Kolkata

Last week, Jeff McManus and I met up with our friend (and Jeff's best man) Jeff Weaver and his friend Prabhat for a wonderful trip to Kolkata. Our colleague and friend, Mihika, invited us to her wedding to Projjol, which was on Christmas Day and was ridiculously gorgeous (see the photos at the end).

Clementines!

Thanks Mom! And Merry Christmas!

The Kindle is not a bomb

Although we're not celebrating Christmas at home, we still get to enjoy some of the insanity of trying to mail Christmas gifts, Indian-style. I set aside a generous hour to mail my three packages to the US (two packets of gifts for family, and one damaged Kindle being returned to Amazon). By now, the DHL/Blue Dart people on Boring Road should know me very well; I'm their only non-Indian client, I'm often accompanied by my adorable little street puppy, and my mother's packages may be their only US mail ever. However, Indian bureaucracy is a law unto itself.
 

Feels like Christmas...

Jeff and I knew that this Christmas would feel very different, because we're not going home for the holidays and we live in a place with very few foreigners or Christians. We're actually going to spend Christmas Day at the wedding of a JPAL Policy Associate - our very first Indian wedding! - so that should distract us a bit from missing home and our families. We already celebrated Christmas with my dad when we were in Nepal; he brought a whole bag full of chocolate, dried fruit and American cereal in enormous quantities, gifts from Jeff's family also. 

View from our office

What could possibly make this scene more Indian?

Ahh there we go:

KathmanUS!

The super cheesy title is the result of over a thousand* repetitions of this exchange, always initiated by Jeff: "KathmanWHO?" "KathmanYOU!" "KathmanUS!!" I apologize for inflicting this on the rest of you.

Dog-Eat-Dog World

Puppy season is the best of times and the worst of times, a spring of hope and a winter of despair. In a recent post, VA highlighted the best, the spring. I now present to you the worst, the winter.

Festivals Part 3: Chhath छठ

Chhath is a holiday unique to Bihar, and it occurs a few days after Diwali (again, Wikipedia for the details). The main events occur over three days, and even though I didn't have much time, I was super lucky because Rashmi, one of our PAs, invited me to join her and her family for some of the festival, which was fabulous. Many people here take at least a week off (between Diwali on the 5th and the start of Chhath on the 11th), and travel to their native places to stay with family. 

Festivals Part 2: Birthday Week

Jeff and I have a glorious tradition called "Birthday Week," in which during the week prior to your birthday, you get spoiled rotten, with lots of little treats and lots of doing nothing while the other person takes care of you. I think it's a marvelous institution that we'll hopefully be able to keep going indefinitely.

Festivals Part 1: Diwali (दीवाली)

Prelude: Jeff and I are en route to Chennai, where we'll have the winter RA Meet before we head off for a week of vacation with my dad in Nepal. I'm writing up a series of  three posts about the happenings in the past few weeks, before the memories all get muddled by our vacation.

Festivals are a big deal here. I can't count how many times our PAs have excitedly told us about the special puja (worship) that I've never heard of being done that day in honor of a wide variety of purposes, frequently involving fasting (and often fasting being done exclusively by women, wives for husbands and sisters for brothers). However, even in the US I'd heard of Diwali. Wikipedia it for the details, but its effective tagline is that it's the "festival of lights." I was told that it's treated similarly to Christmas, as gifts are often exchanged among friends and family. It's such a significant shopping event that most businesses mark the start of their financial year with Diwali, and the period surrounding it is considered the holiday season, much like Christmas.

The streets are filled with puppies

You know when you're a kid and you fantasize about a magical world where everything you love exists in infinitely large quantities? That's a little how Patna feels right now, since it is positively brimming with puppies. Of course there's a rational side of my brain that acknowledges that puppies carry disease and dogs shouldn't be reproducing so rapidly, but oh my goodness they are so cute!

Bihar Ass Time

The Bihar elections have been going on since October 21st, and will continue until November 20th, and on Monday they hit Patna. The city went into lockdown: the military sealed the borders and let no one in or out, and no cars or autorickshaws were allowed on the roads. This meant that besides bicycles and Election Commission jeeps, the streets were effectively empty of vehicles, which in Patna is pretty eerie. Lots of soldiers and policemen with long rifles roaming everywhere though, and also quite a few youth with neon vests that said "Civil Security"; I think some police just gave these guys Rs 100 and a vest and said "go make sure everyone behaves nicely". After election day the police and media claimed victory in keeping the polls secure, with the front-page story of the Times of India opening with the following statement: "Barring an incident of blast by Maoists in the jungle of Jamui and two explosions on the outskirts of Patna, peaceful polling marked the fourth phase of the Bihar assembly elections."

Election Season

On our morning walk with Lalu today, Jeff and I passed an elementary school that's being used as a polling station. Today is the Phase 4 election date, which covers a good chunk of southeast Bihar and small sections of Patna city, including, as it turns out, our neighborhood. We realized that it was a polling station because there was a security guard in camouflage holding an enormous gun outside it, which isn't typical at this elementary school. 

Fieldwork with "Lulu"

You may be wondering what Jeff and I have been up to during this long spell between blog posts. Have they been teaching their pup to be a model canine citizen? Have they been hanging out in coffee shops in Patna, or strolling through the tourist sites? Or have they been busting their butts for JPAL, working long, exhausting hours, just as if they were, what's the term, "field RAs"?

Lalu is the best-loved Bihari street dog

As you may have guessed from the title, Jeff and I decided to name our new puppy "Lalu." Not only is it a fittingly cute name, it also sounds like Lulu, Jeff's dog from home. However, that's not why we chose it. We named our little rascal after Lalu Prasad Yadav, notoriously corrupt and wildly popular Bihari politician running against Nitish Kumar (current Chief Minister - think Governor). Jeff mentioned this in a previous blog post, but one highlight on Lalu's resume was when he was jailed for corruption while he was Chief Minister and put his illiterate wife in his place so he could rule from prison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalu_Prasad_Yadav . Although our pup will never be given the opportunities for devilry that his namesake has had, he's stubborn and charismatic enough to deserve the name. Jeff reminded me that I probably shouldn't use his name on the streets, however, since some people might find it offensive.

We have a puppy!!!

Jeff and I are now the very proud owners of a very tiny puppy, of indeterminate age, breeding and color (light brownish). I am still completely in shock, so I apologize for the explosion of photos; there's a significant part of me that still can't believe we finally have a dog! Honestly, we are so incredibly grateful to Shruti and Rashmi. I'd mentioned on a number of occasions that I really wanted a dog, but they got up at 5am this morning to go puppy hunting, so major props to them! Photos below....

Life at the office: drowning squirrels and twice-daily chai

For the past few weeks, the Patna Team has been happily settling into office-based life. To inaugurate the new space, we did a simplified version of a ritual called ग्रेह प्रवेश (Greh Pravesh), which literally means something like "to go into the home," but is referring to purifying a home before you go in for the first time. Nikhil, one of the project assistants, suggested that we should call it कार्यालय प्रवेश, Caryaalay (office) Pravesh. We only did a small portion of the ritual, but it was still pretty fun; check out these photos:

Fluenzy English School

Although our posts often involve the theme of language, we rarely take the time to focus on particular words that cause us an inordinate amount of frustration or amusement. Nor do we often share stories about how (especially VA's) extremely colloquial American English often bewilders those we interact with. So here are two examples:

Making friends, मानव (human) and मच्छर (mosquito)

Yesterday I came back from another two-day field visit, this time to try to get access to records of development spending. It is legally required to be made publically available, but that doesn't mean it's easy to get. The meetings themselves were time-consuming and frustrating, but ultimately somewhat successful, and I'll be going back next week to get things straightened out. However, I'm not going to tell you about my meetings. Because this time, we didn't stay in a hotel. We stayed at the home of the cousin of my Project Assistant, Rashmi and wow was that an experience.

The Cost of Haircuts and Exercise

Haircuts are often used in intro econ courses to explain the Balassa-Samuelson effect and to justify the use of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) estimates of developing country incomes in lieu of the actual exchange rate. Basically, developing country wages are depressed due to relatively low productivity in tradable sectors despite near-equivalent productivity in non-tradable sectors. To me, this means that I got a Rs 20 haircut today (my first in a foreign country!), even though I pay 46 times this in the US (ie $20). The purpose of my haircut was to keep cool since I am starting a running regimen, and so it gave me an opportunity to think about the relative prices people pay here to exercise.

Hair Spa

In general, I am not given over to extravagance (I just finished reading the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and I'm afraid the phrasing has seeped into my vocabulary…). However, there is one indulgence that I thoroughly enjoy, and that the low cost here allows me to partake of on occasion: day spa treatments. Jeff and I had been hunting for a gym, and we visited one near our apartment called Addiction Fitness (Rs. 5,000 for 3 months, or roughly $36/month - which Jeff says is too expensive). I noticed that upstairs there was a "ladies only" salon, and made a mental note. So here I am, in the capital of India's poorest state, and I manage to find a day spa with prices way more affordable than the US (the entire experience I describe below cost about $15 total).

Barf Pastries

The team is starting to move into the new office. Right now we are in the psychosomatic phase of our move: molding our psyches to coexist seamlessly with the psyche of the office; gradually increasing our awareness of the space and internalizing the concept of Place; joining our minds with the body of the building and allowing the mind of the building to unite with our bodies in a gloriously efficient synergy...

Sundi Proteins - Halal, Hygenic

* This title comes from the sign above a really sketchy looking shop (sorry to ruin your surprise, Erik; it has no bearing on the post)

JEFF AND I JUST GOT CARE PACKAGES. Yes, I'm acting like I'm a 13 year old who just started boarding school. I don't freaking care. We received two packages within a few days of each other (one from my mom, and one from my dad), and we are reveling in the wonderfulness that is American food.

Slow Down. Unless You Have An Appointment With God.

The title for this post comes from a street sign that Jeff Weaver and I saw in Chennai, when we were there for the RA Meet in July. In addition to being totally absurd, it's appropriate for this post, since (as you've probably noticed) I just learned how to post photos from Picasa in a slideshow within a post (and a bunch of other things, like personalized backgrounds!), so I'm sharing a bunch of photos from Chennai that I didn't know how to share earlier (and a bunch of other photos as well, including of our apartment!).

A Free Mud Bath, Plus Exercise

*I’m following Jeff’s lead and changing my blog post titles so that they’re actually informative; sorry they’re not as cute anymore!

Last week, Jeff and I went a two day jaunt to a nearby district to conduct field research, with one of my PI’s (Principal Investigators, the professors who are our bosses). The goal of the trip was to meet with a bunch of village leaders and other government officials to answer some of our questions about how development projects are funded. This was actually our fourth field trip, but we were so swamped afterward that we never took the time to write about the others; sorry! That’s also the reason why it’s taken me over a week to find the time to describe this trip. It was such a riot that I’m taking a bit of time now to write about the experience.

Only Gents Not Allowed

When I was in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh earlier this year, Nikhil and I ate most of our meals at dhabas. The dhaba is a mainstay of the Indian highway and nothing like it exists in the US. It is like a fast food joint without the brand name or the walls, like a gas station without the gas or the station. The dhaba is ubiquitous on all Indian highways, and all dhabas within a region serve the same food at the same price on the same plates. You could almost swear that the little boy (read: child labor) washing dishes back in Hargaon has teleported to Sidhauli to give you another roti when you really don’t want another roti. I miss the dhaba, because oddly enough, dhaba owners signed a blood oath not to set up shop within a 10-mile radius of my apartment. At least it sure feels that way. I ask everyone I meet if they know of any dhabas in the area, and they all say, yes yes it’s here, or, yes yes it’s there, but I check and it’s neither here nor there. It’s like a desert mirage, shimmering on the horizon, not just promising water but also mud floors, dim lights and Rs 30 thalis.

The TOI finds a peculiar instance in Patna where the marginal utility of food is zero

No wonder VA and I get stares for being in the same room together. And I was really excited about going to the zoo this weekend. My favorite part is about the ugly scene in the jungle area.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Kids-on-date-cops-in-a-fix/articleshow/6294212.cms

Part 1: Boring Road

You know how when you were young (read: college), you sometimes would play the "opposite day" game? Where you would pretend that everything was opposite from normal? Well, that's how I feel here sometimes - to be honest, often. I'm not sure how much of this is Patna, or Bihar, or India, or just me.

In Which Virginia Leaves the Apartment and I Neglect to Beat Her

When we moved into our apartment, the landlord only gave us one key. Maybe he expected Virginia to stay put. On a related note, I just read a paper about gender politics in Tamil Nadu, where 30.7% of female respondents stated that a man is justified in beating his wife if she leaves the home without telling him where she is going. In any case, VA doesn't fit into this 30.7%, and I don't beat, justified or not, so we needed an extra key. I asked my buddy to look around.

Literacy Compaign

Triumph! Jeff and I finally bought produce yesterday! We've been subsisting on restaurant food, pasta and Maggi Noodles (basically Indian Top Ramen, which we're very grateful is vegetarian). Last night, we had steamed potatoes and carrots and truly fantastic mango and banana smoothies. Partially because we're cowards and partially because we have legitimate cause, we didn't try approaching our local vegetable and fruit sellers until we had someone who spoke Hindi with us to negotiate prices.

Arakshit

I’ve spent the last two days at a government office, gathering data on reservation status of mukhiyas in Bihar. I will likely spend the next eight days there as well. This is because the data I need is in hard copy, and so I need to enter it all into Excel spreadsheets. It is a bit challenging since the files are disorganized and the handwriting on them ranges from beautiful Devanagari to illegible scrawl, as if the scribes were not all that happy about reversing decades of political discrimination against women. 

Creamy Layer

So, we're beginning to settle into our "empire" - that's what one of our P.I.'s (principal investigator, aka boss) called our apartment, and it's a fair assessment since it's palatial in comparison to typical R.A. housing and most of Patna. As you can imagine, there have been a few humorous hiccups. And now that my mother is headed back to Oakland, we're just going to have to figure them out ourselves…

Last night was our first night in our apartment, and we were very excited to settle in. We arrived at about 11:30pm (dinner is typically around 8 or 9pm around here) to discover that there was no electricity in the building and the generator wasn't working. Surprise! Luckily I knew where I'd stashed a headlamp, so we fumbled through the apartment to our pile of bags and hurray! Light! Unfortunately, no electricity meant no ceiling fans, and it was 30,000 degrees Celsius in our apartment - definitely not conducive to sleep.

Luckily, Jeff is a very curious fellow. We discovered, to our complete mystification, that in fact even without the generator, three outlets in our apartment worked: the plug for the fridge, the light in the Indian-style bathroom, and one other plug in the kitchen. Don't ask me why. We discovered this by running around with our one headlamp (and a cell phone) flipping switches and plugging things into sockets to see what worked.

Also luckily, Jeff is a very creative fellow. Realizing that we really needed to leave the fridge plugged in, Jeff dragged our standing fan into the kitchen and plugged it into the one other functional socket. Then he stretched the fan as far away as the cord allowed, and set our guest cot* directly in front of it (basically at the door, in the hallway in front of the kitchen). Then we collapsed onto it and tried to position ourselves on the cramped cot so that we got the maximum exposure to the fan without knocking each other off. And even though it wasn't the best sleep I've ever had, we were so happy to have that fan.

[*Our guest cot is a wooden board nailed to a metal frame that lifts it off the ground, with a 2" foam "mattress" placed on top of it.]

Unluckily, Jeff and I invoked the cardinal rule of "if you assume, you make an a** out of you and me." Knowing that the electricity was down, Jeff and I didn't even consider testing the A/C window unit to see if it was working. We woke up this morning and the power was still out, and for whatever reason I ambled over to the A/C and viola! Power. So last night, we could have slept blissfully in our real bed, in a cool(er) room, without the need for all that fanfare. Alas.

It is now Day 2 in the apartment, and since most of our P.I.'s left Patna today, we were on our own for dinner. Thankfully, mom had stocked our kitchen full of basic staples, so Jeff and I decided to start nice and easy with the very simple pasta + Ragu sauce meal. Of course, things are more complicated here so while that kind of "dinner" would require zero thought back in Cambridge, MA, it was a bit of an ordeal here. For starters, I haven't used a gas range on a regular basis since high school (and Jeff's never really used one), and I had fancy things like automatic starters and a gas line. Here, we have a propane tank connected to our little two-burner stove perched on the counter (see below):

In order to use the stove, you need to flip a switch on the propane tank and then briskly light a match, turn the stove on and light the gas. This is not a simple maneuver. I had heard of this special trick for lighting gas ranges in the magazine Real Simple, where you light a piece of long, straight pasta with a match and then use that to light your gas range, which gives you a bit more of a safe distance. But alas, apparently Indian  pasta is insufficiently flammable. So I leaned as far away from the stove as I could, with Jeff grimacing in the doorway, and was delighted when the stove lighted after only a few tries. I celebrated a bit, and then realized that I had been so focused on lighting the stove that I forgot to prep the water, so I grabbed a pot and plunked it on the stove with some water. Once it approached boiling, I realized a few key things I had neglected in my haste:

1. The pot was nearly full of water, and boiling water takes up more space than non-boiling water.
2. I wanted to add pasta, which takes up additional space.
3. I had plopped the pot down on the burner in an unstable position, so the now-boiling pot was slightly rocking back and forth.

So I basically backed as far away from the stove as I could while still being able to be considered as interacting with it, and crossed my fingers.

And as you can see below, everything worked out just fine!

P.S. The title to this post comes from the official Government of India website, which uses the term "Creamy Layer" to describe the uppermost castes (la crème de la crème?) in a compilation of demographic data. Totally bizarre.

Paranoia Undergarments

In the past three days, we have essentially stocked our apartment, in a flurry of activity before most of our professors (i.e. bosses) arrive on Thursday. I'm sitting here in the common space of our new apartment while two guys build our bed and dresser (no IKEA here…).  We got some really great stuff, some of it way nicer than we had in Cambridge. There were some things that are a little different here, as you might expect. For one, people don't appear to have ovens. Instead, they have convection ovens that look like microwaves (basically, microwave-sized real ovens). Which is AWESOME. This means that when we cook stuff in the microwave, we are actually cooking it, not turning it into gooey, spongy, post-microwave blobs. However, it also means that when I bake cookies (which I obviously plan on doing soon), I'll have to bake four at a time.

We also have all the normal stuff - fridge, blender, table and chairs, living room couch, bed, dresser, etc. An astonishing amount of stuff to buy in just three days. As soon as we've got it all in place (and I remember to bring my camera), I'll definitely take some photos.

I just spent the past 45 minutes reading through the "India's No. 1? Washing Machine" manual, which was unbelievably detailed.  Unlike in the U.S., washing machines are extremely customizable, so you can determine the temperature, water level, etc. to a much greater degree of specificity. I think that our washing machine may be a bit snazzier than most, because the manual made a great to-do of the "washing algorithm" which controls the relationship between the water level and temperature. I'm not always 100% clear on the nature of this algorithm, however, and apparently neither were the manual writers, who inform us that: "The standard detected by the sensor changing the algorithm is set by the normal standard. It may not be the same to the washing habit of a specific user. So, it does not matter that the user uses it according to his/her washing habit."

Also, the standard wash cycle here is called "fuzzy" (they have an additional setting called "smart cleaning" which apparently is not the customary option…). One other difference is that included with our machine was an "anti-rat cover." I'm a little perplexed why we only had to install that on our washing machine, not our fridge, which presumably would be of greater interest to a rat.  I shudder to think what a rat would make of an operational washing machine.

But before I could have the luxury of carefully reading through the abundance of owners manuals that we now possess, we had to actually buy our stuff and get it into the apartment. Which has basically meant dragging Prabhat and his lovely wife Rim Jhim all over Patna with us to buy nearly everything we need. Of course, we probably could have found all of this on our own, eventually, but they are tough negotiators and we have benefitted so much both from their recommendations of which stores to go to and their expertise with haggling.

Since we finally have the keys to our apartment (!), however, we got a jump-start on the morning by heading to the Mega Mart that Jeff and I found (the one Walmart-type place we've discovered in Patna) and bought a zillion little things (dish scrubbers, mops, soap, etc.) that ending up filling two carts. Now, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do in the U.S. when you hit up the BB&B (Bed Bath and Beyond, to those of you who need translating) and then cruise back to the parking lot where you've parked your sparkling Prius. However, we bought an absolute ton of stuff, without really paying attention to the fact that because we went without Prabhat or Rim Jhim, we didn't have access to a car. So we got out on the street and tried to beg a few auto drivers to take us, but they clearly thought we were too much trouble. A number of cycle rickshaw drivers had approached us early on, but Jeff and I were both highly skeptical that a rickshaw driver could handle the amount of crap that we'd bought, in addition to us. Finally, though, we gave in, and jumped into three rickshaws (one for each of us - me, Jeff and mom) and stuffed the bags in next to us. And then rode for 4ish kilometers with our bodies in weird, strained positions so that we could hold the bags in place and not fall off into the street. How I wish that we'd had the camera with us, because we looked quite a sight.

Oh, and the title of this post is the name of a prominent company that sells stuff at the Mega Mart, which sells both underwear (which we didn't get) and kitchen towels (which we bought 20 of). Not my choice for a family-friend brand name.

So we did eventually unload all of our bags from the rickshaws and headed up to the apartment to clean for a few hours before we met up with Rim Jhim. There's still a lot more to do, but we did clean some windows, counters and walls. Much to our surprise, however, it turns out that the paint rubs off with even the slightest contact with water. So we have to be really careful to keep the windows closed when it rains (remember, it is the monsoon season), or else all the paint will run down to the floor.

After spending so much time and effort acquiring and moving into our new place, it's a bit of a shock to realize that the rest of our bosses will be here in two days for a very intense 5 day period of meetings and field visits. It's a bit of a relief that we'll already have established our base here, so that when my mom leaves (on Saturday), and kicks us out of her hotel, we won't be scrambling for a place to stay, in addition to all of our JPAL responsibilities.

Tomorrow early morning, Jeff and I are going with one of our professors who's already here to a neighboring district to meet with the District Magistrate. We've done a smattering of JPAL work here and there, but tomorrow will be our first really full day (it's about a 4-6hr drive each way to Gopalganj). That should be really cool - we'll get his perspective on the political structure in Bihar, and hopefully meet a few other kinds of officials as well. Jeff arranged for a driver and translator, so keep your fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly!

Tamil Nadu Small and Tiny Industries Association

This past week has been a flurry of activity and inactivity. Some highlights (in rough chronological order):

- Meeting up with Jeff's uncle in Chennai (he lives in a different part of Tamil Nadu). We went to a very popular coffee shop chain called "Cafe Coffee Day" - so it was three Jeff's (Jeff Weaver also joined us), two Jeff McManuses (Jeff is named after his uncle) and 2.5 McManuses (since I was reminded I'm partway there).

- Going to church with Jeff's uncle. Definitely an experience. Probably 2-3,000 people there, and the sermon was given by the charismatic leader who heads up this evangelical movement in India (his father founded it). The sermon rambled a bit over the course of an hour + (it was pretty clear he didn't have prepared remarks). Choice moments include the statement "if you kill a monkey, be sure to run fast or a mob will kill you," and his condemnation of a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. But the music was great (the boys lent me the songbook, the consolation prize since the church was gender segregated so I sat by myself. You can imagine how well I took to that).

- Meeting up with my mom in Chennai, getting to stay at her super posh hotel and use the fitness center (which apparently only Americans use, so said the guy who stood about two inches away from mom while she was on the treadmill, clearly convinced she would hurt herself).

- Having to repack a suitcase in the airport because when it was put on the scale to measure the weight, the scale read "ERROR." Apparently they aren't equipped for 45kg (100lb) bags. What a shocker. (I'd packed a duffle on the top of the suitcase in case we had any issues, so we just checked an extra bag). And before you judge me, remember that I'm going for the year and my mother is a doctor, so fully half of the suitcase is medicines (because of course I'll need three different kinds of splints...how I wish I was joking).

- Arriving in Patna and being driven from the hotel to the airport. Seeing hundreds and hundreds of men and a handful of women. My first thought was "Maybe there's some kind of event at 3pm on Tuesdays that's very popular with women." Of course, it's just that Patna (and Bihar) is much more conservative than Chennai, so while there are definitely women out and about, there are many, many more men doing so.

- Seeing cycle rickshaws for the first time! After two weeks of auto rickshaws (motorcycles with a cage-ish thing to sit in) blasting exhaust into the air and honking like crazy, it's wonderful to have mostly (maybe 65-35) cycle rickshaws (with super cute tinny little bells), about even numbers of motorcycles and bicycles, and some cars. Doesn't make the traffic calmer or much quieter, but it does make it less polluting. Plus, the cycle rickshaws have the coolest embroidery over the awning-like things that you can pull over your seat for a little shade.

Auto Rickshaw:                                                          



Cycle Rickshaw:
 
(P.S. my first attempt at including photos! apparently it works)

- After several days of worriedly trying to figure out how I would find an apartment with minimal Hindi and minimal knowledge of Patna, we were basically handed our apartment on a platter. We have been enormously lucky that an acquaintance of my mom's through work is a very generous and helpful man here in Patna, and he found us a fabulous apartment - three bedrooms, three porches! (oh the plants I will grow, with Allison's advice, of course), nice tile floors, a western style bathroom, a backup generator maintained by the building. Basically a dream. We don't really need three bedrooms, but there will be a ton of JPAL people in and out of Patna over the course of the next year, so we'll hopefully be able to make things more comfortable for folks visiting.

- Best of all, being joined in the apartment inspection by none other than Irfan Alam (http://www.worldandi.com/subscribers/feature_detail.asp?num=26743). He was looking at another unit in the building, and basically tagged along while we walked around our apartment. He's a friend of our acquaintance, and a really nice, funny guy. What a delight!

- Getting an Indian cell phone ("mobile" phone), which requires both buying a new cell phone and getting a sim card. As usual, we're blessed with incredibly helpful people in our life here in Patna, and Jeff's friend and project assistant from his time in Uttar Pradesh got us sim cards so our phones are functional. Hurray!

- Finally, pausing an episode of Numb3rs I was watching with my mom because of a loud commotion outside and discovering that our hotel was hosting a wedding. Of course, we didn't know that until much later. But we enjoyed the awesome procession around the big park in front of the hotel, and up to the hotel (but not so much the embers that landed on us from the ridiculously close fireworks). Not knowing that it was a wedding, we walked back up to the entrance of the hotel, and when a man offered me a plate of juices, I took one (why turn down free juice?). And we didn't really notice that we stumbled through a line of people at the entrance to the hotel, which mom realized this morning (to her horror) was the receiving line for the wedding. Yikes. So basically we trampled through someone's wedding, but can quite honestly write it off as "stupid Americans."

And weddings are definitely on my mind, since today is my and Jeff's pre-anniversary. Because one year from today, Jeff and I are getting married. And even though Jeff and I aren't together right now, we're both very excited!

Snakeguard Korma

First, some great news: We got our remaining two suitcases yesterday! Hurray! Of course, at some point in the process, the handles were broken off of both of our bags, so we're going to try to rig something so we can actually drag them around, but at this point, we are just so happy to have our stuff (intact! although covered in yummy smelling shampoo that popped open), that we honestly don't care. And we spent so many hours fighting with Virgin Atlantic and Jet Airways just to get the bags, I'm not sure we have much fight left in us over the condition of the bags...

Ok, so now that we've given you a bit of a sense of why we're here (and of course continue to ask for clarification and we'll provide it), let's go back to what we're doing. We arrived in Chennai last Tuesday night, and we stayed at a hostel affiliated with our work until Sunday-ish. Then on Sunday, Jeff and most of the other RA's left for the beach resort where we are right now, in Mahabalipuram. I came a day late because I needed to finish registering as an employed foreigner (a lengthy process).

And now we're here at the RA meet, and I'm writing from the most comfortable bed I will ever sleep on in India. The resort is amazing. Everyone had been hyping it so much that I thought I would have unreasonable expectations of its awesomeness, but it really is gorgeous - greenery everywhere, a huge pool, right near the beach, ridiculously sumptuous buffets and the most hypervigilant service I've ever seen - we routinely have to reassure the staff that no it's ok, we don't want a third scoop of ice cream… because we have ice cream for dessert at both lunch and dinner! And anyone who knows me knows how delighted this makes me.

As a sidenote: the ice cream issue is a funny one, since India has notoriously bad ice cream (when it's available at all). I was chatting with a guy who grew up in Delhi, but who had gone to the U.S. for a summer internship, and he asked me, all wide eyed, if I had heard of "Ben and Jerry" because he said it was the best thing he'd ever tasted and he would go to the grocery store just to buy some. Just imagine, for those of you who have had the fortune to taste Toscanini's or Grater's, what he would have thought! One of the other RA's in Patna informed me last night that there was this big news article because Patna just got Baskin Robbins, so perhaps there's some hope for me there….

But really, we're not here to eat ice cream. They have us working from 8am - 8pm, no joke, which is exhausting but also exciting, especially now that the sessions have begun to move away from the theoretical background of RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials, what we do) and into more of the nitty gritty tips for how to run successful projects. We're also broken into groups of about 6, and each group is given a different real J-PAL project that we're supposed to design the sketch of an impact evaluation for. We meet for a few hours a day, and we're supposed to present our conclusions tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes :).

So who knew several months ago that I would now (mostly) know how to calculate statistical power? To be honest, as the material covered in the training moves closer to logistical management and planning, I'm feeling increasingly confident that I wasn't the "admissions mistake" - my brain went into overdrive when one of the presenters was talking about putting together a training for our survey teams (which apparently they don't have a handbook for yet in India, so that's something that probably a group of RA's will work on). Needless to say that it did not during our 4 hour session on statistical power, despite the awesomeness of the presenter.

And that's something else too - we are incredibly blessed in having an amazing executive staff. I haven't been naming any names because, while I know that only a few people will read this, all blogs are public documents (so I apologize if my stories sometimes sound vague or confusing!). But yeah, I could not be happier with the people that I'm working for, and I feel really comfortable going to any of them with questions or concerns, which is definitely not something to take for granted.

Oh and the title is the name of one of our dishes at lunch yesterday. It was actually pretty tasty, although lord only knows what was in it...

Rich and Creamy: Ice Creams, Cakes and Fried Chicken

So, before I dive into what's been going on the past few days, let me explain the title of this posting. I have decided that for the time being, I'm going to name the blog posts after ridiculous signage that I encounter here, since we have seen such a multitude of spectacularly absurd signs, that it seems a pity not to share them. At some point, I may run out (e.g. while I'm here at a beach resort for our training), but in the meantime - enjoy!

It has been almost a week since I last wrote, and I think that we are starting to get into the swing of things. We still don't have our two suitcases, but they have been located - Delhi - and an amazing member of the J-PAL staff is going to pick them up from the airport for us (hopefully).

First, though, since a few folks have rightly pointed out that I haven't actually explained what we're doing or who we're working for, a quick summary. Jeff and I are happily employed by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab South Asia (J-PAL SA). J-PAL is part of the Economics Department at MIT, and although you can find a much more detailed explanation on their website (www.povertyactionlab.org), in short, they evaluate international development projects through randomized experiments. So a government body or an NGO will either have an existing program or be starting a new program, and they'll call J-PAL in to see if it's working. And J-PAL will tinker with things, setting up randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and then lovely field RAs (Research Associates) like me and Jeff will implement the experiment (supervised of course by our Principal Investigator(s), or PIs). Once a bunch of data is collected, it gets sent to the RAs (Research Analyst) in Cambridge, who analyze it.  Jeff worked for J-PAL in Cambridge last year as an RA, so he's really excited to get some field experience now that he (mostly) knows the ins and outs of J-PAL.

Doesn't sound like the kind of thing you'd expect me to doing? Well, I certainly didn't think that I would end up at J-PAL when Jeff told me that he'd been asked to go to India for a year. I thought I'd teach English or find work at an education NGO, but then I met with the staff at J-PAL (to ask for suggestions for where I could look for work), and they described this really awesome project they were going to be starting up in Bihar, and things took off from there.

Although there's a lot still uncertain, in broad strokes, I will be trying to enhance the effectiveness and political power of elected female village leaders (Elected Women Representatives - EWRs) in Bihar.  Bihar has a reservation system, which means that a third (and soon, half) of the village council seats are set aside for women (otherwise there would be virtually no female political representation). However, J-PAL has done previous studies which have made it clear that the reservation system is not currently accomplishing as much as it was hoped it would.

So, the project that I'm working on is designed to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the reservations, and maximize their effectiveness. What's that's actually going to look like is still TBD. So I'm entering the project at a really cool phase - I get to design the initial qualitative research that will help us determine what specific skills and competencies we want to target (ideally, what the EWRs themselves have identified as important), and then jump into designing the intervention, which will be in the form of some kind of training. Although I'm doing a lot of Econ-ish stuff, there's also a strong educational component. So I get the best of both worlds - a topic that I'm already passionate about (perhaps not the political effectiveness of EWRs specifically, but certainly women's empowerment, civic engagement and education!) and an opportunity to learn a whole host of new skills that I definitely would not have learned otherwise.

I'm very lucky, since I know what project I'm working on in Patna.  Jeff doesn't actually know what he'll be working on (two possible projects were cancelled), but he's kept plenty busy by his bosses. Hopefully one of these days he'll have the time to sit down and talk about what he's up to, since I definitely can't do it justice.

Phew ok I'm going to give you guys a rest - the next entry will be about what we've been up to the past week or so.

We've made it to Chennai! Our bags, not so much.

Jeff and I are delighted to have arrived in Chennai last night. We've had a good night's sleep, got to catch up with Jeff Weaver (one of our good friends from Swarthmore who is also a JPAL RA in India), and have started the various registration processes. 

However, our four suitcases appear to not have fared as well. It turns out that we had a somewhat more complicated journey than we thought we would when I wrote the first post. This was our final itinerary:

• Leave Boston at 10:55pm on June 20
• Arrive Paris 11:35am on June 21
• Leave Paris 1:25pm
• Arrive London 1:45pm
• Leave London 10pm
• Arrive Delhi 11am on June 22
• Leave Delhi 1:30pm
• Arrive Mumbai 4pm
• Leave Mumbai 5:30pm
• Arrive Chennai 7pm

Shockingly enough, we actually arrived only 8 hours later than we had originally planned, which is a complete miracle. However, we changed our flight to London three times (once because of technical issues, which we mentioned in the previous post, and the second time because the flight we were told we had been booked on was oversold, so we had to get a different one), which caused us to change our flight from Mumbai to Chennai three times also.

So it's no small surprise that our bags, possessing (hopefully) less intelligence than ourselves, didn't make the journey. Jeff just spoke with a representative from Virgin, who informed him that two of our bags will be sent to Chennai later today, but the other two will be held in Mumbai for unspecified reasons. The Virgin agent said that we have to go to Mumbai to get them, but we're going to see if we can convince them otherwise (since there are a dozen flights between Mumbai and Chennai every day).

But hey, we're incredibly relieved to be in Chennai. And soon enough we'll have our belongings and will be able to give back to Jeff Weaver the clothing he has very generously loaned us.

So we got in last night about 9pm, after dinner had ended, so we met up with Jeff Weaver and after receiving and misunderstanding directions to a restaurant nearby, we ended up buying snacks at a convenience store - Mad Angels chips and Special cookies (the big winner - chocolate with chocolate filling) and some other kind of simple biscuit that was also tasty. When we're back in the hostel, I'll write again to give you the names, b/c they're hysterical. I'll also write more about the hostel itself.

We had our first Indian breakfast this morning at our hostel, which was super yummy, and then caught an auto rickshaw (a rickshaw with a motorcycle built in, instead of a bicycle) to the IMFR/JPAL offices. We were very nervous about having to negotiate with the rickshaw driver for the first time, but very luckily, two nice women who will be participants in our training but are from a different organization walked by just as we started, so they did the talking and we just hopped in. Our driver didn't actually know how to get to the offices, however, so he ended up taking a lot of backstreets and asking a lot of other rickshaw drivers, but we left 2 hours early, so I didn't mind the extra sightseeing.

When we arrived at the office, we met the lead staff, who were all really nice and helpful. Since we had American rather than Indian passport photos, we were taken to a photo store (called FastPort) to get our photos taken (the guy there asked if we wanted to use a mirror first, and I laughed - I'm grateful to have bathed, and my requirements stop there). While we were waiting for the photos to print, the staff member who was with us asked if we wanted anything, so we went across the street for some fruit juice.

We had tender coconut, which I believe is just young, softer coconut, that hasn't developed the strong flavor that we associate with coconut. It was a really cool experience - the stall was just a simple table piled high with green tender coconuts, and the guy behind the table sliced off the top with a machete and stuck a straw in it, which we drank right out of. It had a much more diluted and less sweet flavor, but it was definitely refreshing. Then once we'd finished off the coconut water inside, we handed the coconuts back and the guy used his machete to slice them in half and carve out the meat, which we scooped out with a chunk of the harder shell. And then we crossed the street and stepped back inside the high tech photo store - just the beginning of a year-long cognitive dissonance we'll be experiencing.

So now we're in the office (which is really nice and air conditioned), waiting to register as employees, which we need to do in order to receive income and pay taxes.

We'll keep you posted on our bags and all of the other antics we get up to...

Bihar is still so far...

Jeff and I are starting this blog to share our life in India with our friends and family. Hopefully, it will be mostly amusing anecdotes and cute pictures. There will probably be some tougher days that we will want to share with you in a carefully filtered and edited way so that you don't worry. But really we just want to represent as accurately as we can what we're up to.

A quick rundown of the next few weeks:

Jeff and I are heading to Chennai, a coastal city in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, for the Research Associate training. We're getting there a few days early to settle in. Then, I'll fly to Patna and Jeff will probably go to Delhi (plans are TBD and depend on his projects).

In another entry, we'll give you more details on our projects (and more info as the projects themselves develop). We'll also give you some cool historical info on Patna and Bihar (the state that Patna's in), since they have some rich history.

But for now, let's begin with a recap of the past three weeks:

• Jeff proposed (and I naturally dove into wedding planning)
• We hosted a friend for a week, Jeff's family the next week (with sightseeing), and my mom the following week (with packing)
• I went to Swarthmore overnight for wedding stuff
• We shipped our car and most of our stuff to CA, and crammed four suitcases and an assortment of bags full of stuff for India
• Jeff worked full time, except when his family was in town.
• Jeff and I were each sick for a week.

So it's been a crazy time. I'd made all kinds of ambitious plans (studying Hindi 2 hours a day, going to the gym every morning, etc.). Instead, we miraculously managed to get to where we are right now: in Boston Logan International Airport, waiting for our first flight.

This is additionally miraculous because of the news we received this afternoon: that our flight to Heathrow had been cancelled. After many hours of talking to folks and waiting (and some truly spectacular service agents at Virgin Atlantic and Air France), this is our new itinerary:

• Leave Boston at 10:55pm on June 20
• Arrive Paris 11:35am on June 21
• Leave Paris 1:25pm
• Arrive London 1:45pm
• Leave London 9:25pm
• Arrive Mumbai 11am on June 22
• Leave Mumbai 3:20pm
• Arrive Chennai 5:05pm
• Collapse.

Probably a dozen times today though, Jeff and I have turned to each other and remarked on how glad we are that we're doing this year together. Even though this hasn't been the simplest of days, we've managed to have a great deal of fun - from things like our Sbarro receipt that had printed on the bottom, "Thank you very much! Please exercise regularly!" Of course, navigating flight changes will be laughable compared to the challenges awaiting us in India, but it's nice to know that we'll have a good time together no matter what happens.

More to come soon, when we're happily ensconced in the dorms at IFMR in Chennai...