Saturday, December 11, 2010

I woke up early this morning, at about 5:20 AM, to start the wedding festivities. I got about 5 hours of sleep last night, plus the 4 hours of sleep I got yesterday afternoon, so I feel pretty well rested

I got dressed in a traditional Indian outfit, and headed over to one of Anup’s relative’s house for chai tea. 

Getting dressed for the wedding

I had heard about Indian chai, but it was even better than I had imagined. It’s so delicious! I think Anup’s parents are addicted, as is most of India it seems. But I can’t blame them, because I think I may be addicted as well when I leave India. It’s very easy to make, you just boil tea leaves (usually Assam or some other dark leaved tea), and once the tea has brewed you add milk, ginger, cinnamon, and sometimes sugar. Not everyone likes sugar in their chai, for example, Anup’s parents hate it that way, I like it with or without. With sugar is more of a dessert for me, however most places you order it from seem to add sugar unless you say otherwise. According to Anup, his grandma had to get dentures because she was drinking chai with sugar about 7 times a day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masala_chai 

The great thing about chai tea is that it’s probably the safest thing to drink for foreigners, besides bottled water. That’s because it’s prepared at very high temperatures, so it eliminates all the bacteria in the water that’s used to make it, which is usually public water if you order it. You can even safely drink it right off the street, which is not true for just about everything else.

In addition to the tea, we also ate a small morning snack, consisting of these orange disks made of dough. They were weird tasting to be honest, they looked like cheezits, but tasted bitter. We said goodbye and then headed out for our first full day of wedding festivities (it was actually the 2^nd of 3 full days of the wedding, we missed the 1^st day). 

We traveled by car to the city of Nadiad (about a 58 km drive), which was where the wedding was to take place. I had been stared at in Vadodara, but it was much more intense here. It’s not a hateful stare, like the stare you would get as a white American walking the streets of Iraq, but more of a curious “What on earth are you doing here?” stare. People were flipping out just because of my presence, I was the talk of the town, at least in my immediate vicinity. 

Anup dressed up

Lopa and Nita

Me, as an Indian prince

We went to Alka’s house. Alka is Anup’s aunt on his dad’s side, and she is the mother of the bride, named Radhu. Quite a few people gathered at the house, everyone was talking and eating these fried dough balls filled with spinach. They weren’t that great but it was the only thing I had eaten all day since we had to leave the hotel before they served breakfast. Food is fuel to me at this point in my trip, I’ll explore the cuisine later when I have more time and a little more daring. Anup’s dad watches everything that people bring to me or try to feed me, if he doesn’t think it’s safe he just waves them away. It’s pretty awesome. Did I mention he is a doctor? 

The entrance to Alka's house

The Sanskrit swastika

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika

A woman washing clothes the next house over

A household statue of ganesh

Once more people had arrived at the house, the dancing started. These 5 kids arrived at the house and brought with them these traditional Indian drums and drum sticks. They started playing this crazy Indian drum beat, it was really loud and very tribal and rhythmic. All the men went crazy and start dancing, sometimes the women joined but mostly it was the men, which is pretty standard in India. The dancing is very simple, just throw your hands up in various forms with the beat, move your legs accordingly. Anup by far danced the most, he was the star of the show for sure. I tried to stay out of it but I had no choice, I was pulled in by many eager people. If you are young and healthy, you are expected to dance, lest the glaring eyes of the elders rest upon you. So I gave up and jumped in, and I’m sure I looked stupid, but everyone loved it. Everyone loves what I do here, it’s great. The older men mostly try to stay out of the dancing, they will only dance if pulled into the fray, and they can’t last very long. Actually, most of the men don’t last very long, they take frequent breaks. 

I get suckered into dancing

Dancing with Anup

As a side note, Indian men seem to mostly be in poor physical shape, by American standards (I say “standards” because while health is the talk of the media, most Americans are fat). Their poor shape is due to the complete lack of exercise in Indian daily life, and also their eating habits. Nobody exercises here, nor do they care to do it. Just like Americans, if they can do it without walking, they will, and nobody ever runs for any reason (speaking in future tense now, I never saw a single jogger in India). There are no gyms that I can see. Indian men also eat a lot, and they eat constantly all day long. For a man in India, having a fat belly is considered healthy, it means you are well fed. It’s considered bad health to be thin, and especially bad if you start out with a fat belly, and then lose weight. People think you are sick or your wife does not feed you properly. For example, Anup’s dad lost some weight recently and is feeling healthier and looking it too by U.S. standards. But there has been a continuous stream of family members coming up to him, grabbing his face and neck, and telling him he’s too skinny. He explains to them that he lost weight because he had a heart attack and wanted to get healthier, but it doesn’t matter to them. Please note that this is all referring to middle class Indians. Low class Indians do not have the luxury of eating all day and thus this is not an issue for them.

Now you would think that with all this lack of exercise and excess in eating that you would find a slew of medical problems, but you don’t. Strangely, their health is mostly great. I believe their good healthy can be attributed to the complete lack of processed food in their diets. Everything is made fresh daily here, a fridge is a luxury that few people can afford. Whatever is left at the end of the day is thrown outside for the cows, which are in no short supply here. They are India’s sacred animal, but also its garbage disposal, along with the wild dogs. Apparently the main issue people experience here is hypertension, and that is due to the high sodium levels in their food, which I can personally attest to. In fact, Anup’s grandpa had apparently never taken any medication in the form of pills until recent years when his salt intake led to high blood pressure, forcing him to take blood pressure medication. That seems to be the only medication Indian men are on. Contrast that to America, where sometimes it feels like every person is on some kind of medication.

After a lot of dancing, introducing myself and being introduced, we went to a nearby restaurant for lunch. The restaurant was just like a covered area with movable chairs. All the food was prepared fresh by people in the back of the restaurant, separated from the rest of us. I looked back there and saw a few women kneeled down on the ground cutting vegetables. There must have been hundreds of people there over the course of the meal, the cooks stayed quite busy keeping up with the demand. People were very curious about me and would walk up to Anup and ask him to translate for them so they could ask me questions. I met Anup’s paternal grandfather here, who was one of the most cheerful people I’ve ever met. He had a permanent smile on his face. 

Anup's grandpa

I met a ton of people here, including a young boy who was able to do extremely complicated math problems in his head. His father was bragging about his abilities, and asked us if we wanted to see what he could do.  I videotaped him answering his father’s math problems, and also some questions of our own. He was using a method I had seen used in a documentary about Chinese school children, the invisible abacus method. Essentially the children are trained to use an abacus to do arithmetic. Eventually, when the children are skilled enough and have committed the abacus to memory, the abacus is removed entirely, and the children do the math problems as if there was an invisible abacus right in front of them, moving their fingers and such. It’s quite interesting.

After lunch I went back to Alka’s house, and met the bride Radhu. She was dressed in her traditional wedding attire, and she looked amazing (sorry Rachel!). I had never seen anything that ornamental on a real person before. She was very excited that I came to her wedding, and similar to many of the people I meet in India, it was very important to her that I had a good time. People are constantly coming up to me to shake my hand, and they always ask “You like India?” or “First time Indian wedding? How do you like” My first response is usually “Ok” or “Good”, but I have come to learn that they prefer the phrases “fine, very fine”,  “first class”, “top”, and “100 out of 100.” When they say “top” they make the a-ok symbol.

Me, Anup, Radhu, Lopa

Radhu dressed for ceremony

As another side note, one thing I find so incredibly frustrating about India is the lack of respect for their own land. They throw their trash right on the ground as soon as whatever it was has served its purpose. There are no laws against it, and literally everybody does it. The only people that didn’t partake were those of us who were American. When they finish eating or drinking out of something, it drops right where they stand, or they might even make a game of seeing how far they can throw it. There is so much trash everywhere I go that sometimes I feel that I am walking on streets made of trash. Because of the unfathomable amount of trash they see on a daily basis, it has become built into their brains that there is no point in throwing things away in a trash can because it won’t make a difference. I watch people in cars throw things right out the window. Some of it is biodegradable, but most of it is plastic, and it just sits in huge piles in the streets. It cannot be blamed entirely on the general population though, because trashcans are few and far between. There are rarely trashcans that are easily accessible or even present at all. However, this all falls back to the lack of government funding, which is likely due to many people avoiding paying their taxes. But I digress. 

In addition to the trash, the pollution is just terrible. The amount of cars on the road, combined with the lack of government control of emissions from vehicles or factories, creates this thick, permanent smog that never goes away. They sky is usually grey, sometimes brown. The one saving grace, for this town at least, is that there are very little industrial facilities nearby.

Back to the wedding. Now that the bride was dressed, she was around talking with people, and taking photos. Everyone else was sitting around, talking, and relaxing-the national pass-times of India (The Indian phrase for pass-time is time-pass). A lot of the men here seem to be U.S. citizens or Canadian citizens, or they have children who are studying in the U.S. You have to be quite wealthy to send your children to study in America, considering travel expenses and the poor exchange rate for Indians. One of the men was talking about how he was afraid for his son who was studying medicine in the U.S. because he was “afraid black people might shoot him.” Black people, please don’t take offense to that, I’m merely the messenger. Interestingly every male college student I’ve spoken to here was either in medical school or engineering school. Since I haven’t seen much different in the U.S., I must assume that the stereotype is mostly true.

After being at the house for some time, we went to this meeting hall nearby to greet the groom, and bring him to the actual ceremony, yet another part of Hindu wedding tradition. I believe this is where he had been preparing and getting dressed. I had quite an experience getting over there. I was offered a ride on a motorcycle by a guy who I had never met before. Anup was offered the same by someone else. I saw him speaking with Anup prior to heading to the meeting hall, so I assumed he was trustworthy, and he was also generous enough to offer a complete stranger a ride. So I hopped on back, and we headed down the road. The only issue was that no one had told me where we were going, I was under the assumption we were now heading to the actual wedding ceremony. As we were driving down the road, we passed the field where the ceremony was to be held. I tried to tell him that he had passed it, but he spoke absolutely no English, and kept looking back and smiling at me. We kept riding for another few minutes, and I began to panic. I had to assume he had no idea where we were supposed to be, and we were going to some random far away place. I was going to be stranded in an unknown place, with no means to get a hold of Anup (he had the only cell phone that worked in India). Much to my relief, we pulled into a parking lot and there was Anup on the back of a motorcycle, and I was not slow giving him a hard time for not keeping me in the loop. 

Father and son

After about an hour of talking, greeting, and refreshments, we yet again went back to the house (I know, it’s getting repetitious at this point, I felt the same way). We were there to wait for the bride to come out and take her to the actual ceremony. When we arrived at the ceremony, it was the first time I had been reminded of America on my trip thus far. The locale was a large, open field, covered with Bermuda grass, probably the size of 3 or 4 football fields together. It was mowed short and reminded me of a golf course. There were people as far as I could see, all around me, about 2000 in all. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. Anup was telling people there that there were 200 people at my wedding and they would laugh and say “That’s all?” This was the first time where the staring became very noticeable. It was so bad that I mostly kept my eyes to the ground and stayed with Anup the whole time. It’s not offensive staring, it’s just that most of them had never seen a white person before, and if they had, definitely not at a Hindu wedding and certainly not one as white and tall as me. Everyone wanted to talk to me, especially the kids. 

The ceremony was very high profile, the bride and groom both coming from affluent local families. Middle class weddings usually have much less people apparently. There was food everywhere, being served by wait staff. It was good food but unfortunately I could only eat the steaming hot food, meaning I missed out on ice cream and other cold food and sweets.

To give you an example of how nothing happens on time in India, the ceremony was intended to start at 6:30 pm, but did not start until 9:30 pm.

Wedding ceremony

In a Hindu ceremony, the actual procession with the bride and groom that makes them husband and wife is not the main focus. In fact, not many people were paying any attention to them once they were actually on their version of an altar. Only close family are seated nearby, everyone else was just walking around the field, eating and socializing. Even some of the close family were chatting amongst themselves. It was strange to me. I much preferred to be the focus of my own wedding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_wedding

After the ceremony was over we took pictures with the bride and groom. Radhu the bride seemed to really like me and asked me to stand next to her in a group photo. Apparently, pictures with the bride and groom are the most important part of the ceremony, it is literally the only reason some people come. Everyone waits their turn to get a photo with the bride and groom, and they will wait as long as it takes.

Picture taking on the altar

I was so exhausted after being out for 19 hours straight that I fell asleep on the car ride home, and I barely remember getting into bed. It was a good night sleep and fully reset me to India time.