Megha Bahree's blog

I was standing at the top of an escalator at the brand spanking new international airport in Delhi. (The swanky new airport, a huge improvement on its predecessor, was recently built by the Bangalore-based GMR Group.) In front of me was an ocean of people, in queues that numbered in the 40s, waiting to get through immigration. I got down and walked past all the lines, looking for the shortest one. I was moving back to India after 8.5 years in New York. After that journey of my life, what was another 30 minutes, I thought. So I queued up in the line nearest me, plugged in my iPod, and decided to be patient while listening to OneRepublic. The illusion of organized travel ended pretty quickly.

The booth serving the line next to mine had been empty for a while. So while my line managed to inch its way forward, the folks next to me had been getting increasingly agitated as both the officers at that desk had been gone a good 20 minutes. Finally two men–they looked official in their matching gray suits–took over the booth and started to process the paperwork. Suddenly a man standing in the line started clapping loudly. “Finally,” he said loudly. “We’ve been waiting here for ever. You call your self a manager? My 13-month-old son can do a better job of managing this booth.” The rant continued with how ineffective the whole system was. Other passengers chimed in. The cowed immigration officers dropped my queue and were only processing the one next to me. Anything to get the angry man out the door, I suppose.

Life in India is never without more than its fair share of drama. I can’t wait to catalog at least some of that!

Like most city people I used to think that women in rural India, especially in a state as troubled as Chhattisgarh, were probably meek, submissive and had no option but to accept their lot in life. They are often like that in the cities so why not in the hinterland? Not so in Chhattisgarh. Savita Rath, an activist I met in a village on the outskirts of the city of Raigarh, is 34 years old and single. And she doesn’t give a damn about anything. She hitches up her green saree and asks me in Hindi if I voted for Barack Obama or John McCain. This is clearly a test. An ardent Obama supporter, she recalls that her family had been divided between the two candidates and she didn’t go to work for three days leading up to the Nov 4 elections, until her candidate won.

After she finished her high school, Savita trained to be a teacher and taught in the village school. Until the day the principal made a pass at her. She slapped him in public and announced if he didn’t apologize to her in front of the entire school, she would lodge a complaint with the police. A panchayat was held and she appealed to the village elders. Before she could go to the police the school principal’s father begged her to let it go and prostrated at her feet. “He was my elder and it was not right that he was begging me and touching my feet,” she says. So she resigned. Soon after she joined a not for profit organization and has since been working on issues like right to health, food and land rights.

Savita isn’t the only one. From villages near Raipur to some near Raigarh, I met several remarkable women. One village that has been embroiled in a fight to keep a local steel maker out was worried about intruders. The villagers put up a barricade and a group of women kept a round-the-clock watch for days. In another village the residents had been protesting another company that was trying to acquire their land when the police launched a laathi charge. One woman snatched the stick out of a cop’s hands and beat him back with it.

And they do all this while they cook, clean, and work in the fields. They also take care of the flourishing business of tendu leaves – these are dried and used as a cheap substitute for tobacco. Having a lucrative business has helped boost their self worth and independence.

We’ve entered Bastar in southern Chattisgarh. The area is stunning with thick foliage lining the excellent (though skinny) road. Beyond the trees are fields that extend as far as the eye can see, almost touching the base of mountains that are perfectly placed in the backdrop.
Suddenly there’s a splash of color on the road. We’re lucky. It’s a group of men and boys from the Gondi tribe. Roughly 70% of Bastar’s 1.3 million people are tribals. Every month this particular group travels in the area, performing a ritualistic dance as they walk from one village to the next, celebrating their tradition and teaching the younger ones the dance steps so they can carry it on. Sun glasses and t-shirts are sort of compatible with the traditional head gear and waist belts. The outside world has clearly entered theirs.

Driving from Raigarh to Raipur. It’s been raining on and off. The dust on the roads has settled, the leaves have been washed a clean green. The blue polyethylene sheets that are blocking the rain on some thatched roofs match the blue walls of some of the houses in the villages we are passing through. The sweet smell of damp earth is in the air and other than an occasional truck, the road is all ours.
On either side of this two lane road is a vast expanse of fields and the odd station to sell the crop, dhaan, piled high in multiple rows of sacks.
Chhattisgarh has three reserved forests, parts of which can be seen along this route, the thick foliage lining the road.
Time for some of the best ginger tea at a roadside shack in Saraipali.

http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/diptoshmajumdar/5/53973/salute-thee-mumbai.html

While it’s quite a visual treat to see Indian PM Manmohan Singh and US prez Obama stand next to each other at the White House, the real question is if the two can move their respective foreign policies forward, and toward each other. The Obama administration is yet to extend any meaningful measures toward India. (Trying to ram Richard Holbrooke down India’s Himalayan throat was clearly not the way to go and the US hasn’t really done much since to make up for that.) This is the opportunity to seal a camaraderie. Or have India pine for W.