Another Point Of View

Natalie Scriven, who helps to organise the competition for The Guardian, was travelling with me in India and her own blog about the trip is now going up on the competition site.

I am the shadowy figure referred to throughout only as "the finalist".

Down By The River

An absurdly early start this morning, as I’ve been told that one of the truly essential things to do when visiting Varanasi is see dawn from a boat on the Ganges, or Ganga as it is known here. The Ganges is a holy river for Hindus, and is used as a sort of shorthand for power and greatness. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says of himself “I am the shark among the fishes, and the Ganges among the rivers.” Nowadays, Hindus come here for two reasons: to wash their sins away, and to die.

Well before sunrise those who come to wash their sins away were gathered along the Ghats, the steps which line the river, leading conveniently down into the water. Above the Ghats, palaces and temples belonging to assorted strands of Indian royalty stand in varying states of disrepair. Of course, those washing themselves are not necessarily here for religious reasons, it is also the only bathing option available to many, although I have to admit I declined to wash in the water myself. Holy or not, the Ganges was the birthplace of cholera and remains pretty unpleasant – at one point we pass two huge pillars, painted pink and decorated with religious icons. At first glance you might miss the fact that these are actually there to pump sewage into the drink.

Those who come to die in this city come eventually to the Manikarnika Ghat. It is perhaps the most famous of the Shamshan Ghats, where bodies are cremated and their ashes are washed away by the river. The shore is piled high with wood to feed the fires which burn constantly, and it costs thousands of rupees for the privilege of being cremated here – a price worth paying for those who believe that dying in Varanasi and being burnt on the river will release their soul from the cycle of transmigration.

Dawn on the Ganges also attracts another group of people: tourists, like myself – and where there are tourists there are business opportunities to be had. I spotted the boat pictured above cruising alongside the boats of wealthy looking foreigners (they kept well clear of me). They were selling DVDs and CDs, and you can see their television set on the right of the picture, where it was nosily playing music videos. It made for an incongruous site – the awed tourists attempting to take in a foreign tradition while the locals drew alongside like pirates to sell them imported digital ephemera. I have no idea how they were powering the screen on their tiny vessel, but by that strange magic of the television set, the fact that it was on meant the tourists found themselves powerless not to watch.

After that early start, it was an abrupt return from my sojourn into tourism and back into meetings with academics from the several Varanasi universities and journalists from a range of local and national press organisations, including the Times of India and the Hindustan Times to try and put the conversations I've had with weavers and traders in a wider context, and hopefully establish whether or not the entire handloom industry has, like those DVDs, been sold down the river.

Come On Pilgrim

The Tibetan temple at Sarnath

A break in my itinerary this morning gave me the chance to make the short journey to Sarnath, which as I've mentioned before is one of Buddhism's four pilgrimage sites, and is dotted with temples built by various Buddhist countries and communities. It's considered a pilgrimage site as it was here that Buddha first taught his outlandish new theories on peace, love and understanding and in doing so made this unassuming deer park the location where Buddhists believe, as one inscription put it, "the doors of enlightenment were opened". Which makes it sound a bit like Stargate.

Buddha's head will eventually be attached to...Buddha's body

It’s really not much like Stargate, but there are some pretty big monuments on display. The above Buddha is obviously still under construction, but when it’s finished I’m told it will be the largest vitarka mudrā Buddha statue in the world, vitarka mudrā being the specific hand gesture iconography which depicts teaching. The nearby Sarnath museum has a plethora of both Buddhist and Hindu artifacts, dating from thousands of years BC, not to mention the Lion Capital of Asoka, from which India takes its national emblem.

A spotted deer (axis axis) poses helpfully

The deer park itself is still intact and remains an idyllic, peaceful setting even if the site where Buddha is supposed to have actually taught is marked by some rather gaudy statues of him and his five students. There is also a small zoo, which contains the aforementioned deer, a crocodile, some rabbits and an openly racist pricing policy which may or may not date back to the time of Buddha himself.

Paneer Burger

Yesterday was inevitably going to be hectic as I tried to meet as many people as I could and keep my horizons as wide as possible, but today I endeavored to narrow my focus a little and spend some more time with the people who are at the heart of this story – the silk weavers and their families. The afternoon was spent talking to this group of village women, whose perspective was just as colourful as their saris. I had spent the morning in one weaver’s home and workshop, chatting to him about life, his hopes for the future and, inevitably, cricket. He told me excitedly about the time he had travelled from his village into Varanasi to join the crowds trying to catch a glimpse of the visiting Indian cricket captain, and basking in today’s glorious sunshine it was easy to see how much he enjoyed watching the young locals thumping the ball around with their home-carved bat. His real passion, however, was for his craft, and it was impossible not to get a sense from him of just how important weaving is as a facet of his identity. My own ambitions to work as a writer are certainly not driven primarily by a desire to be economically rewarded, and similarly his passion for his art transcended any question of working only for survival.

I am reticent to talk too much about him, however, as I sense he will play a major role in the article I eventually write, so I’ll move on to tell you about my lunch at Burger King. This was not the chain Burger King, but a smallish Varanasi restaurant which had bizarrely purloined the name of the giant American franchise. I say bizarrely, because in a country which worships the cow to the extent of letting it rule the roads and even, in one famous Varanasi example, live in a clothes shop, the chances of you getting a Beef Burger are similar to your chances of being served a Labrador Burger at Crufts. So when I saw that this restaurant lived up to it’s name and offered ‘burgers’ amongst the daal and naan, I ordered immediately, as much out of curiosity as desire. What arrived was a ‘paneer burger’, a deep fried slab of goat’s cheese served with onions in what was basically a hot dog bun, and accompanied by quintessentially American ketchup and mustard pots. It wasn’t as bad as that sounds, but something had definitely been lost in cultural translation. McTikka would be just as odd.

And the rain came down

It's the end of my first day of field trips, and I'm absolutely shattered. We've spent today visiting the silk weavers who have been on the sharp end of a whole combination of effects that I am still struggling to understand. My only consolation is that an easy answer wouldn't make for a very interesting article - and one of the few things I can say with any confidence right now is that there isn't one. It hasn't just been weaving I've seen today, however, as we've also witnessed the attempts of rural people to find alternative forms of employment. The marigolds pictured above are always in demand in Varanasi, this holiest of Hindu cities and within striking distance of Sarnath, a Buddhist pilgrimage site as the location where Buddha delivered his first teaching, and with new farming techniques they are able to be grown all year round.

It has rained pretty constantly today, which is good news for the 60% of India's workforce who are employed in the agriculture sector and have been hard hit by the lacklustre monsoon season. While visiting the rural communities today however I was reminded that while so many people make their living off the land, agriculture accounts for just 18% of Indian GDP, down from 30% in 1990 as this Economist article on the monsoon season points out.

The rain was bad news, however, for Peter Caton, the photographer who's accompanying me for this piece. His mind-bogglingly expensive cameras are not a big fan of wet weather, and storm clouds don't make for good lighting, but tomorrow is another day and we can only hope one of them has a silver lining so that the incredibly generous and hard-working weavers I've met today get a portrait that does them justice.

From London with love

The other day I wrote about a sign on a construction site in Delhi four years ago which stated “Construction in progress. Please be patient with delays for a better tomorrow.” At the time I described the speed of social change as a “slow crawl”, but landing in an unrecognisable international airport in Delhi this morning I was shocked to see how fast the landscape has changed, in this wealthy corner of Delhi at least. Transformed from the dirty floors and rickety baggage carousels of the airport I remember, Indira Gandhi International is now all marble and gleaming glass, and the huddled groups of men, women and children begging and hawking as you pass into the heat of the Indian capital have either disappeared or moved on.

In Delhi, we, that is Catriona from Find Your Feet, Natalie from The Guardian and myself, met Savitri, Find Your Feet’s India country manager, before our onward flight to Varanasi. Varanasi airport belongs to an entirely different era to Delhi’s. While we wait for our baggage, a power cut plunges us into darkness and brings the carousel to a juddering halt. As we leave the airport it is immediately clear that we have travelled further than we thought on our short internal flight. The difference is not just architectural, it is also cultural. The Delhi we glimpsed has become remarkably Anglophone, from signs to magazines, indeed even to the eager market research that we had thrust upon us to review the sparkling new airport. In Varanasi, Hindi, Urdu and local dialects remain dominant. Our hotel menu is an exception to that rule, and offers a glimpse of a culinary view of the British from an Indian point of view. The “Continental menu” includes a dish entitled “From London with love”. It is fish & chips.

Get your plane right on time

Yesterday I was planning on writing some last thoughts on my previous experiences of India, which were going to focus on the contrasts interwoven into the fabric of the country like gold thread on plain cloth. The picture above is one I took of the Taj Mahal, surely one of the world’s most photographed buildings, but set in the context of the city of Agra, with its crowded buildings in varying degrees of disrepair, each less photogenic than the tomb which dominates the skyline and attracts tourists in droves. Its familiar splendour seems somehow incongruous when placed amidst houses where, if you look closely, you’ll spot a goat tethered to somebody’s rooftop.

I was also going to talk about seeing women in rags stood in traffic at junctions, clutching swaddled babies in one arm and selling copies of high fashion magazines to wealthy commuters with the other, giving the name ‘Cosmopolitan’ new meaning. I was also going to mention the elderly man, presumably homeless, who I saw being ejected from a museum of natural history in Delhi. He had found his way into a life-size diorama entitled “Endangered Animals of India”, but he was not made welcome there.

Unavoidable distractions and last minute preparations meant I never posted what I wrote then, but today presented me with another moment of high contrast from the minute I boarded my flight. My excitement at getting the trip underway was prematurely curtailed by muffled screaming coming from the back of the plane. Over the tops of the seats I could see a large man with a bald head pinning someone to their chair. The stewardess came down the aisle to reassure those of us staring blankly in disbelief. “He has tried to come here illegally”, she said, “He is being sent home.” A home that one has to be dragged back to kicking and screaming is surely no home at all. The excitement of families and tourists on their way to Delhi and that lone man's terror provided the first dramatic juxtaposition of a journey I'm sure will be full of them, a timely reminder of the struggles people face here that leave them seeing no hope but escape.

I don't like cricket

"You're English? We love England! Go Michael!"
"Oh, yeah... Michael Owen's pretty great."
"Who's Michael Owen? Michael Vaughan! Michael Vaughan!"

It turns out that teenage boys in India don't care much for football. At Akshay Pratishthan, a school in Vasant Kunj in Delhi, when the bell goes for break it's bat and ball they reach for rather than jumpers for goalposts. I never played cricket at school, so after I'd taught English phrases and pronunciation in the classroom, they returned the favour by schooling me in the playground.

Akshay Pratishthan has over 400 students but what makes it truly remarkable is it's integration of children from different social backgrounds and with different physical abilities. One of the defining architectural features of the school is the long, gradual wheelchair ramp that loops up the side of the building to ensure that all students can get to the second and third floors - something that, now I think of it, couldn't be said for many areas of my university.

It's a relatively prestigious school, but parents are assessed and then pay what they can afford. Wealthy parents were happy to pay the fees to get their child in, but equally it was not uncommon for some parents to be supporting several children on 1,200 rupees a month, which at the time translated to around £15, or a dollar a day. In these cases, schooling was free, subsidised by donations the school received and by the higher fees those who could afford it were paying.

The important thing, though, is that it worked. Nobody, least of all the students, seemed to care about their contrasting home lives or the wheelchairs, crutches and prosthetic limbs which were commonplace. Due to the school's limited provisions, wheelchairs were usually old and crutches and prosthetics were never guaranteed to match the size of the child, but on no account would this be allowed to interfere with that obligatory game of cricket.

No Parking at the Gates of Heaven

Thinking about going back to India prompted me to dig out and read my notebooks from the first time I travelled there in 2005, when I worked with local governance NGO Sahbhagi Shikshan Kendra. This was the first photograph I took when I arrived in Delhi. Of course I knew that cows roamed free in Indian cities, but looking back I am certain I wasn't prepared for actually seeing them making their way through traffic.

Another unmissable first impression was the staggering array of temples and places of worship India has to offer. My favourite was one we passed on the drive from the airport. The sign above the door read, in English:

Gateway to Heaven

Before adding, charitably:

Admission Free

And then a final note, perhaps a reminder of the transience of our worldly possessions:

No Parking

Another sign we passed ostensibly apologised for the building work going on to improve the road, but could have been a message from those in power in India to those dismayed by the slow crawl of social change. It declared: “Construction in progress. Please be patient with delays for a better tomorrow.” It will be fascinating to see, some four years on, whether that "better tomorrow" appears any closer for the majority of India's billion inhabitants.

Finding My Feet

Ngiri-Ngiri, Kinshasa, DRC photograph by Susan Barry

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting at my desk at work when I received a phonecall from the offices of The Guardian to tell me that I had been shortlisted in the amateur category for this year’s International Development Journalism Competition.

By the time I began receiving confirmation emails and an invitation to visit The Guardian's shiny new offices in King's Cross, I had just about convinced myself that this was neither a wind-up nor an administrative error. Being shortlisted meant that not only would the article I had submitted on open sewage trenches in the Democratic Republic of Congo be published online, I would also be "flown to a developing country to research a new assignment".

At The Guardian I met not only the seven other shortlisted amateurs, whose intimidatingly good articles are here, but also the eight finalists in the professional category, whose pieces you can read here. We were all eager to discover where we would be sent off to, and amidst all the tension that can be created by pulling strips of paper from a glass bowl, I was selected to visit the partner organisations of rural livelihoods NGO Find Your Feet in India to research and write an article about traditional silk artisans living near the ancient city of Varanasi, and the pressures that an increasingly globalised marketplace is placing on their way of life.

The afternoon was a blur of visa applications and briefings, including a short visit to Find Your Feet's small London offices. I fly out to Delhi on September 5th.