India

I expected to be overwhelmed by India. We had been told that nothing could prepare us for the poverty, chaos (both good and bad), and diversity we would experience. While there was a great deal to see and learn, I wasn’t overwhelmed. Part of this is certainly because I stayed in the south, and didn’t get up to the northern states where people are poorer and more desperate. Nevertheless, I had the opportunity to get an in-depth look at life in India at several social strata.

The highlights of my 5 days in India were going to IITM (Indian Institute of Technology – Madras) and meeting some CS students, the SAS field practica – “Child Labor in Rural India” and “Working Women’s Forum” which allowed me to see firsthand the impact of microcredit operations, and meeting Rama, a refreshingly honest auto-rickshaw driver (Google “auto rickshaw” to see what these tiny vehicles look like).

IITM is one of the 7 IITs, popularly referred to as the “crown jewels” of the Indian education system. It is located in Chennai (Madras was the British name for the city). It took us a solid 2 hours to finally find some students to talk to – they didn’t have a visitor’s department and were perplexed as to what we were doing there. Finally, an administrator in the Placement Office (career center) just called a couple students who work for him to come show us around. They came expecting that we were recruitment officers wanting to offer them jobs, but were happy to take us around anyway when it became apparent that we were just students. It was very interesting to learn about Indian perspectives and attitudes on IT and globalization (for example, India is infatuated with Google). I was surprised by how worldly and informed these CS students were, compared to their counterparts in China, and indeed even in the US. With China, much of this can be chalked up to the government regulation on information, particularly internet censorship. As for the US – complacency? The top jobs are all in the US now, but there is a lot of up and coming talent globally, and they have their eyes on those positions.

I grilled those IITM students about IT in India (and they grilled me in return), but I’ll refrain from going into that in detail here. Ask me if you’re interested in what I learned.

I’ll talk about microfinance in a separate post, so I’ll jump right to talking about Rama, the auto-rickshaw driver. In Chennai, all the rickshaw drivers know that Semester at Sea pulls in every 6 months, and they can make a killing ripping us off outrageously if they all collude to keep prices high. Rama refused to play this game, and charged us the local rate – 1/16 of what the other drivers were asking. He explained that “bad money will burn in their pockets” – he believes in kharma. Rama is a Sri Lankan refugee. He was an electrical engineer in Sri Lanka, but when he brought his family to India due to the civil war in Sri Lanka (which continues to this day), he found that he could not get a job as an engineer unless he paid the right people. Refusing to do this, he ended up driving a rickshaw.

Rama has 3 daughters. One of them is married, and he struggles to put the other two through private education (the public school system is terrible). One of them is in college studying history; she wants to be an elementary school teacher. The other one is in high school and wants to go into law. Rama said that while we were here, we were like his own daughters. He held our hands as we walked across the street – “because Indian traffic is very different from what you are used to” and made sure we made it safely back to the ship. On the last day, he bought strings of jasmine flowers to pin in our hair, explaining that this is what Indian fathers do for their daughters on special occasions.

Rama wants to save up enough money to buy his own rickshaw, so he can earn more money (the one he currently drives is rented from a company). He tells me that the next time I come to Chennai, he will drive me around in his own rickshaw. His daughters are sometimes a little exasperated with him because he comes home so late, but they know he is happy taking care of the tourists he meets. I certainly appreciated all of his help and honesty, and wish him the best of luck.