| Mar 29, 2006 - Road trip - 1,200 KM of rural India in two days
| (click to enlarge)
 |  | (click to enlarge)
 | | (click to enlarge)
 | | show all 13 | | Along the way, we saw many motorcycles modified like this to carry a load. | | These are the older-style autorickshaws that burn gasoline instead of compressed natural gas. | | The menu at our truckstop-ish lunchspot. | | |
| We immersed ourselves in the culture of rural India with a two-day road trip. Our goal was to meet with seven grassroots innovators in their homes.
The National Innovation Federation (NIF) has assisted each of these innovators with commercialization, marketing or other expertise. NIF helped us plan the trip, set up the meetings with the innovators, arranged our car and driver, and sent C.P. Singh along with us.
C.P. is NIF's manager in charge of administration and media dissemination. We have had many meetings with him since arriving last week and have gotten to know him quite well. C.P. was in the Indian Air Force for 17 years before joining NIF three months ago. He is a serious man who is dedicated to helping the people of India. He enjoys a good laugh, and is the intense sort of person who establishes trust immediately. We greatly enjoy working with him.
In the following entries, I'll do a quick write-up about each of our stops along the way. I'll use this entry for more general comments/observations:
We have had a very challenging time staying on schedule. Two things are contributing to this:
1) There just doesn't seem to be any sense of urgency among the people we are meeting with. We tell our hosts that we have only one hour to talk and must move on after that, but they don't seem to take notice. This is compounded by issue number 2.
2) All of our hosts have been over-the-top generous. I've honestly never seen such heartfelt hospitality in my life. Most of the people we are meeting with are very poor - even by local standards. In spite of this, they continue to serve us snacks, drinks, tea, and give us gifts. This makes it very difficult to keep our schedule. We do not want to seem rude or unappreciative, so when gifts are given and snacks are laid out, we end up sticking around for another 30 minutes.
We were doing a decent job of staying on schedule during the first day of our journey until we ran over a piece of metal in the road and heard a nasty noise under the car - we had damaged one of the rear suspension springs and needed to get a repair. We found a "shop" a few kilometers down the road (see pictures), killed some time with an impromptu tour of a diamond cutting/polishing facility while we waited for the repair, and were back on the road in a few hours.
The plan for that night was to sleep at the home of one of the innovators. Now that we were about three hours behind schedule, we called the innovator to let him know about our change in plans, checked in to the Hotel Paras and called it a night.
On day two, we met with five innovators in four different villages. I'll leave the details to the individual entries.
Here are a few general observations about our journey:
-C.P. didn't have specific directions to any of the innovators, or even their towns. Armed with a road atlas, we would pull over as we got within 10 km of a town and ask a local to point us towards the town center. As we got closer to the town, we switched over to asking for the innovator by name. Everyone seemed happy to help and pointed us in the right direction. We did have mobile phones with us, but it seemed that C.P. and our driver preferred this method over calling the innovator and asking for specific door to door directions. This might be partially due to a complete lack of street signs.
-When we pulled over for our first meal of the trip, our driver slinked over to a separate table. We insisted that he join us and paid for his lunch. Same thing happened at dinner. When it came time to sleep for the night, we were told that the driver would be sleeping in the car. We insisted on buying him a hotel room. It became clear to us that the driver's role was to serve us and he felt that he shouldn't be a part of our group. By our dinner on the last night, he had gotten over this with us and we all enjoyed eating together. (although we can only understand about five words of each other's language.)
-We noticed that people here pour water and other cold drinks into their mouths instead of touching the bottle or cup with their lips. Maybe they know something about germs that I should be paying better attention to.
-We were served chai tea in saucers. No cups - just hold the saucer and carefully tip it towards your mouth. Maybe this is to help in cool more quickly since it was over 110 degrees and we were drinking hot beverages.
-People were fascinated with our digital cameras. They pretty quickly grasped the concept that you could view a picture on-screen immediately after taking it and often insisted on seeing the photos. They also enjoyed taking pictures with our cameras.
-The generosity and kindness here can not be overstated. One of the other students was having some bathroom issues and we needed to find a toilet - quickly. We pulled into a government housing complex and asked at the front desk. Instead of taking us to a public bathroom in the building, they got a key and let us into one of the hotel-like rooms in the facility (complete with western toilet!). About five minutes later, they returned with cold water for us. They then left us alone in the room for as long as we needed it. I couldn't even imagine this type of hospitality in the United States. |
| |
| |
