Welcomed Wedding Crashers

In planning my trip to India, I knew I had to stay through February to attend the wedding that Margaret and I were invited to by a friend from Xavier, Ashwin. On February 8, we headed to Vidjayawada, Andhra Pradesh, to meet up with Ashwin a few days before the wedding of his friend Ratna (who actually studied at the University of Indianapolis) to Alekhya. His family hosted us in their guest apartment (there were three bedrooms, but Ashwin found it funny that we each took our own room), fed us incredible homemade south Indian food, treated us to some ice cream at Baskin Robbins, and welcomed us into their lives. The first night we arrived, after eating dinner, we were whisked away to dance practice. Ashwin was supposed to be in the Sangeet, or pre-wedding dance party/performance, and Margaret and I were to accompany him to practice. Somehow, they managed to rope us into performing in the Sangeet as well. Never fear, the Sangeet was still four days away; we had plenty of time to practice (luckily we had only four moves). That night, we went with some of Ashwin’s friends to a Tollywood movie called Mirchi. (Yes, there is a film industry in India separate from Bollywood; Tollywood movies are all in Telugu, the state language of Andhra Pradesh.)

Indian weddings are extensive events, and they certainly don’t always happen on weekends like in the U.S. Ratna and Alekhya’s actual wedding ceremony was scheduled for February 14, along with about 300,000 weddings in Andhra Pradesh alone. No, it had nothing to do with Valentine’s Day; the marriage ceremony time is usually determined by horoscope, and something about the alignment of the planets made February 14 one of the most auspicious days for a wedding. Though we arrived February 8, we had only a few days before the wedding festivities began: first the cocktail hour, then the Sangeet the following day, then the wedding itself two days later, and finally the reception. The wedding itself along with the Sangeet and cocktail hour are events put on by the bride’s family in her hometown; the groom’s family hosts the reception in his hometown, so we would be heading to Hyderabad for the wedding.

But before we got to the wedding events, we got a chance to visit a nearby village. Ashwin’s friend Deepak was taking his wife Usha and their daughter back to visit with her family and attend a family wedding (while he attended Ratna’s Sangeet with us and then left for another city to go to a different wedding), so we tagged along, met Usha’s family, saw her uncle’s banana plantation, and took a boat ride on the Krishna River. I learned a lot about bananas: the trees take about 11 months to grow and yield only one crop, and they frequently use crop rotation with turmeric. The biggest challenge was the language: Telugu. Even Margaret couldn’t understand because most people do not speak Hindi. Although most of Ashwin’s friends speak English (many even studied in the U.S.), most of Usha’s family does not. Still, they welcomed us with open arms, fed us frequently, showed us around, and took us on a boat ride. These experiences are definitely much better than the typical tourist experiences that we’ve largely been having since.

Because there were so many weddings on February 14, Ashwin had to pick and choose events of the weddings, so we, along with several other of Ashwin’s friends, stayed in Vidjayawada for the cocktail hour of a wedding we were not attending. On the morning of February 12, Ashwin’s friend Sanketh picked us up, along with two other friends, to drive up to Hyderabad, an approximately 4-hour drive. We arrived, met up with Deepak, picked up Ashwin’s fiancé Deepika, and headed over to another Sangeet practice. Here, we met the bride, Alekhya, who also welcomed us to her home and her wedding. We sat with Deepika and got to know her, practiced our dance moves, and then went to Ashwin’s place in Hyderabad to rest and get ready for the Sangeet. The dance performances were awesome, and the location was outstanding – outside, next to a lake, with a large tree as a centerpiece. Okay, the dance performances were mostly awesome: Margaret and I missed the cue for our dance, largely because there were people blocking the stairs up to the stage, so we raced on with no time to think about our moves. I actually have no idea how we did other than coming on late, but we survived. After the performance, we had an incredible dinner and then started in on the dance party. By the end of the night, we were exhausted. We had danced, met many new people, and had a wonderful time. While Ashwin went out with some other friends, his friend Aditya took Margaret and I back to get some sleep.

The next day was Ash Wednesday, so Margaret and I hit a few of the sights in Hyderabad and then went to church. There are many more Catholic churches in the South than in some of the other areas we’ve been due to its longer history of missionaries and colonialism. After dinner with Aditya, Deepika and her friend Ayushi, and Ashwin, we went to ABCD: Any Body Can Dance, the first 3D Hindi dance movie. As usual (and because it started at 10:30), I fell asleep. But the parts I saw reminded me of Glee, and everyone else said it was a terrible movie.

Finally, the day of the wedding arrived. While Margaret stayed in to get some work done, I went with Ashwin and Deepika to the lunch hosted by the groom’s family for their guests, then to the mall and a bar to hang out with some of Ashwin’s friends. Ashwin then sent Margaret and me off with his driver to see a few more of the Hyderabad sights. Traffic was terrible, and it took us forever to get to the fort, which Ashwin said was a must-see – even more important than the wedding. By the time we got back, tied our own saris (it takes some practice to be able to wear 5 meters of fabric as a dress), and made it to the wedding, many of the guests were leaving; we had missed the marriage part of the ceremony. There was still, however, plenty going on. Ratna and Alekhya were on the stage with the priests performing the ceremony and several of the guests, so Ashwin took us up to watch. I couldn’t be too disappointed at missing most of the ceremony after Ashwin’s friend Varun commented that even most Indians have never seen a full Indian wedding ceremony. I just got the native experience.

 

The next day, we returned to Vidjayawada for the reception. We went to lunch at Ratna’s house with a plan to attend the formal reception that evening, when we heard that Ashwin had successfully secured our tickets to Hampi for a train that left that night. So we gathered our stuff, had dinner, said farewell to Ashwin’s family, and went to the train station, where Sanketh met us to say goodbye, and we boarded the train. Remember how there were 300,000 weddings in Andhra Pradesh on February 14? Well, as the receptions were all in the home cities of the grooms, Ashwin had about four receptions to go to that night. And we were off for our next adventures.

Living Infrastructure

We’ve had our second major multi-day storm since I arrived at Navdanya. While I enjoy the power of the storms, I’m glad it’s not monsoon season. The field work stops on rainy days (although there’s always grain-sorting to do), and frequently the power is out other than around meal times, when they turn on the generator. The storms I’ve experienced are incredibly unseasonable, especially in their near-monsoon-like fervor. Some of the crops that survived the first round of storms had barely started to recover before the second round hit. When we met with some farmers who attended a farmers’ workshop, one of them said that climate change is the biggest challenge he has to face in farming. The changes to the climate and weather patterns have been noticeable and harmful for him, and these storms are just one example.

The physical structures at Navdanya, combined with the importance of weather and climate to the work to be done, force us to live in a way very much more in tune with the natural world around us. No two rooms are connected indoors, forcing us to walk outside to get from one place to another. There is no central heating, so we just have to dress warmly – although the entire time I’ve been here it’s been warm and sunny enough during the day to make dealing with the cold evenings and nights worthwhile. We frequently eat lunch outside, and most of our internal spaces have big windows. All of these factors connect us to the natural world around us.

As Richard Louv writes in Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, access to nature can help to alleviate symptoms of depression and attention deficit disorder. I’m a little concerned about how well I’ll adapt to less nature exposure when I return home. I’m lucky in that respect – I have some nature in my backyard, and I work on a farm. Many don’t have those experiences of nature on a daily basis. One fellow intern commented about her experience growing up in New York City, that she had some really negative experiences that she felt could be attributed to the environment around her.

In urban environments, it’s much harder to find that level of exposure to nature. It’s worse in India than in the United States because the air quality makes you not even want to walk outside (although it’s not much better inside). Yet it seems quite likely that the future of the world will be increasingly urban.

Urban environments certainly offer many advantages: the concentration of people can make social interactions more easily accessible; the high population densities make public transit and walking better options than individual automobiles, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making people healthier; and cities can serve as diverse cultural centers, with art galleries, concerts, and theatre much more common.

For most people, the question is not one of urban versus rural – it seems quite clear that urbanization will continue to increase in most of the world, ideal or not. The question is, instead, how we are going to create urban environments that are at a human scale and fulfill our biophilic natures. Can we achieve this without sacrificing the density that makes cities what they are? Are community parks and community gardens detrimental enough to density that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits that they offer?

Yet the environmental benefits that cities offer are only benefits in comparison to suburbia and the rural modes of living after the introduction of the automobile. In many communities, rural living is more environmentally friendly than urban living. In an increasingly globalized, specialized world, however, is it even possible to live more sustainably in a rural environment? A case comparison between India and the United States reveals that the answer to this depends significantly on the physical environments and infrastructure available. Most cities in India have limited public transit options, so auto-rickshaws frequently taxi people around, spewing significant amounts of particulate matter into the air and leading to the horrible local air quality that makes you not even want to step outside.

In the villages I’ve been to, people have great social connections, and busses drive through frequently, allowing for decent access to cities when necessary. In fact, in some villages, the introduction of external markets led to many of the social problems they now experience; previously, they met all their needs successfully themselves. People also rely much more significantly on human- and animal-powered transportation than in the U.S. Certainly, however, villages cannot offer everything that cities can. I know that I would be unwilling to give up the access to education, knowledge, communication, and culture beyond one’s local culture that comes from connections to global (or at least broader) markets and communities.

I’m not convinced that it’s possible to have this same experience in rural United States. I would suggest that rural living in the U.S. is either less sustainable than or equally sustainable to suburban living. Many factors are at play in my perception of this: the fact that farmers don’t grow their own food anymore, so still need to go to the store, and the breakdown of communities across the country (see Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone), which has become more pronounced in farming communities as and people have begun to rely on mechanized labor rather than labor-trading between neighbors and the farms have gotten bigger and thus more spread out, thus requiring automobiles to get to the store, school, church, or a neighbor’s house.

The reality is that the ideal living situations of individuals vary vastly. The type of living environment that I would prefer might be vastly different than your ideal living environment. I might even need to make a tough decision between multiple choices that all offer distinct advantages and disadvantages. What we need is the infrastructure in place to make all of these options more ecologically sound choices for people to make.

Sometimes Goodbye Is the Hardest Part

There is never a "right" time to travel. Sometimes, you just have to take the risk and leave anyway. Knowing that my grandpa was getting older and really missing my grandma (his wife of 63 years, who died last November), I hoped that my gamble would work. Unfortunately, that was not the case with one of the best men I've ever known. Fortunately, I was able to make sure to visit him before I left and to Skype with him while traveling (he made sure to let me know he was going to brag to his Hardee's friends that he got to talk to someone on the other side of the world). Not too long later, I found out that Grandpa was in the hospital and probably had cancer. The diagnosis was confirmed, and he returned home to hospice care, his loving family, and an official prognosis estimate of three months. I heard he was going downhill quickly and started to look into flights home. Then I got the call from my mom: Grandpa died about an hour before, at 10:45 a.m. Saturday morning Indianapolis time. Luckily, my friend Margaret had rejoined me at the farm and stayed with me the whole night. My new Navdanya friends have been equally wonderful, letting me brag about my awesome grandparents and my incredible family.

When my mom first called with the official diagnosis, she told me I didn't have to come home, even for the funeral. At the time, that was the worst idea I had heard my entire life. I've always been so grateful that I was around during the last days of my grandma's life, and deciding to stay in India was probably the hardest decision I've ever had to make. I know I made the right decision, but I hate that I won't be with my family to celebrate his life. Fortunately, I have a very wise little (or maybe just younger) sister who told me, "Your lifetime of memories with Grandpa are far more important than your final goodbye." I have that and more - the wonderful legacy that he left behind, my family. Margaret also told me that she could tell he came to visit me. (We are 10.5 hours ahead, so it was right on his way to eternity.)

Grandpa, here's to you, a hero to your children and grandchildren and a wonderful example of love and selflessness. You may not have realized your impact on those around you because it was so much a part of who you were, but the little things made such a difference to those around you. I always felt you were proud of me, simply by the way you introduced me to others. You taught us so much, you loved us so much, and you gave us so much. I'm happy for you that you got to die at home, surrounded by family, and rejoin the love of your life. You will always be with us. Thank you for everything. Tell Grandma hi and I love her, too. I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my Grandpa you'll be.