Pass-a-port!

Have you ever read the book "I heart New York"?  Well, it's about a British girl in her mid twenties, who takes the first flight out of London to New York to get over a bad ugly break up (she finds her boyfriend cheating on her, in case you were wondering). While I understand the need to leave a country when upset, I don't see this working in case of an Indian girl in the middle of a bad break up. To start with she'd have to have a valid visa to the USA, which for just a tourist visa would take her about 2 weeks or more to get. But even if she has a valid US visa already, she'd need to apply for something called an "Airport Transit Visa" to get there. Most flights to the other side of the world are through the European Union or UK and require a Transit visa which is not only expensive to begin with, but is also time consuming to acquire. By then she'd be more frustrated than before.  

Why do Indians not travel as much? This is precisely the reason. My grandfather often flaunts his American passport and says with pride "I can travel 166 countries with this". Even though he has no intentions of making those trips at this age, I am sure it is a relief to know you don't have to go through paperwork and stand in long visa queues to travel to another nation.

I recently experienced something similar. I got an internship in Colombia and I was mighty excited. But soon the excitement died down when the paperwork started. I got my Colombian Visa in a day, after I submitted my papers and I was given a courtesy visa which was free of charge by their ministry of external affairs since I was going there to help teach kids. But that was not the real problem. The real problem was when I got to the airport they said I cannot travel coz I do not have a "transit visa" for "Germany", since I had to switch flights at Frankfurt. I was confident I didn't need one because I checked the rules online and even my travel agent assured me that I won't need a transit visa because my layover was for less than 12 hours and I have a visa to the final destination country. I checked a lot of other sources and all the information was so scattered and on sites which were not very authentic. Some say you only need one if you are travelling through two Schegen countries and others that you need one if your even flying over one of them(just in case you have an emergency landing).

Well bottom line, they made the rules stricter more recently so I had to come back and apply for a German transit visa which cost me 6200 Rupees, only to sit at their airport for 7 hours (and change my travel agent).The irony of it was my visa to Colombia was for free. The German visa delayed my travel by two weeks, only because their appointment dates were so booked and I was made to go back this one time for not having an already booked ticket. Now you tell me, if they say the visa processing takes anywhere between 3 to10 days, when do you book a ticket for? What if you book it for the 3^rd day and they give the visa on the 5^th day? Ugh!

Imagine a world without borders. It would be really confusing and pose many problems, I guess. But there was a time when there were no passports. That was the time when explorers could just get on a ship and name a piece of unclaimed landmass after their name, nations could conquer and rule other nations without a war and trade spices and other goods without an import or export duty.

“During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons (to keep out spies) and to control the emigration of citizens with useful skills, retaining potential manpower. These controls remained in place after the war, and became standard procedure, though not without controversy. British tourists of the 1920s complained, especially about attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they considered led to a "nasty dehumanisation"…..Passport standardisation came about in 1980, under the auspices of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).” – Wikipedia, passports.

I agree with the ‘dehumanization’ part. Everything from having to prove your purpose of visit to standing in the queue and being directed like cattle and treated with mistrust is rather dehumanizing. But unfortunately that’s what the world has come to. 

All about Sports - Part 2

What does being a female sports player, at any level, in India mean? 

Believe me when I say - there is NOTHING glamorous about playing at the All-India-Level for the Girls University Basketball team! Apart from being a sort of a short lived celebrity back in college among peers, being acknowledged on stage by the principal on annual day and bettering your game playing next to some of the most amazing female players in the country; the experience of actually playing for the university team is anything but worth remembering. With no funds, resources and sponsors, most of us make it to the tournament in improper shoes with no ankle support, last minute sports-quota-tatkal-train-tickets with no confirmed seats, in terribly designed Jerseys with substandard Jersey material and barely 10 days of practice of playing together as a team. This is the case with most Indian universities barring the autonomous institutes. 

What Indian sports meets really lack is hygiene and infrastructure. Sure you get to meet the best players of 91 teams from all over India at one place, but you also need to share a room with three other teams and sleep on hard wood or steel classroom tables and benches or the floor. The worse is not fighting for place to sleep on but the queue to the bathrooms. With the bathrooms all booked in early mornings and evenings the best option is to take a bath at odd hours like 2 AM. The toilets are in a worse condition and not equipped with proper dustbins to dispose waste. The whole restroom experience is worse than that of a general class compartment. If you are used to home made food and not hostel food then you will dread the two boiled eggs, milk, a banana and porridge breakfast they provide, which although an ideal sport diet is bland and tasteless.

There is corruption in every department in India, so by default in sports. With scandals at the highest level and in international sporting events like the common wealth games there is little to say about the state of sports in India. The funds don't reach where they are suppose to be invested, or there are not enough funds allocated for 'a girl's sports tournament' to start with. But there are other forms of corruption too. The most popular of all is what I call - 'knowing someone that knows someone'. Our first year university team had a girl who's dad was the coach's friend. She certainly was not as competent as the other girls who were far better than her. But they weren't selected because the 12th player doesn't matter as long as the coach's friend's daughter gets her national level certificate to get her sports quota for a government job. With that kind of attitude the coaches seem least invested in us and we barely get the motivation we need. No one seems to care whether we win or lose, or even try.

Its not like female players do not get the encouragement they need. I've always had plenty of encouragement from my PT sirs in school. In fact they even made us play matches against the boys, treating us equal.  The basic barrier most girls need to get past is family encouragement. Then again there are examples of girls like, Surekha I met at the All India university matches in Amaravati University '08. She was a 19 year old girl who played for the Rajasthan university team and was on phone with her husband and daughter every night giving them updates on the matches. If conservative states like Rajasthan can give their married women the choice pursue their passion, why can't we expect more from others?

Even though boys tournaments have little bigger budgets and better equipment, the story is the same. It seems like the capitalistic approach towards sports is what gives a sport the due attention it deserves. With IPL and more recently IBL spending in crores on players-bidding and having league matches with media coverage, this is what is earning the players the kind of luxury only affluent sports like golf could once earn. Although to play golf one needs to be born into an affluent family to start with. So unless you want to end up as a sports coach after retirement; capitalism is the only way of achieving true upward social mobility through sports.

Hopefully one day all sports in India will receive the notice they deserve and sports players the respect. 

All about sports - Part 1

Having been a sports enthusiast all my life, I believe it has played a very important part in shaping me as a person. I bet most sports players will agree with me when I say that although a stress buster, it is hard to manage time for sports with our hectic work schedules as adults. We wish we could go back to our golden childhood days where we had hours to practice and perfect a skill.

Kids pick up sports faster than grownups, are more agile on field and have a bottomless stamina reserve. That’s why it becomes that much more important to channelize this energy to yield maximum result. To be on the national team one needs to have a coach from age 8 and 30 hours of practice every week. The reason china churns out so many Olympic medalists a year is they find their players young, as young as age 6. At that age how does one tell whether they have the skill it takes to play a sport? They have a series of tests from medical to body length measurement to scout their trainees and subject them to the tried and tested sports person diet and discipline to turn them into champions. But if you trace back stories of Indian Olympic medalists you will find it is either painful, driven by the need to earn or out of sheer coincidence. The access to resources is the biggest challenge in India. That is the reason most Indian Olympians are from the Indian army.

I was lucky enough to have access to these facilities as a child and have fond memories of horse riding, Olympic sized swimming pools and golf summer camps. But even though our school had a huge play ground we lacked proper coaching. Affordable private schools do not even have a privilege of that. Hijacking the games period to finish the syllabus is the worst form of torture you can put a child through and happens all the time here. Thus, the fact remains that sport is not given the due importance it deserves in our academic curriculum for the overall development of a child here in India.

Sport instills integrity, honesty, teamwork, leadership and teaches one honor, the importance of participation and also teaches to cope with defeat. It’s an easy choice when it is between learning life skills versus sitting in a class every single day, staring at the black board and mugging up pages and pages of things they don't comprehend. It is unfortunate to see crucial aspects of personality development that sports adds are being left out in a typical school schedule.

The concept of mixed sports and gender equality is non-existent in most APSs. The year before last a couple of IDEX fellows had tried to have a mixed team cricket league, but of course were faced with a lot of opposition from the conservative and regular schools alike.  ‘Girls-versus-boys’ in a classroom environment is the norm but never in a playground. They say the only way to get better at a sport is by playing with people better than you. But girls are never given a chance to. Girls don’t have hand eye coordination because they play with dolls and not throw around a ball high up and play catch. But if they are allowed to they can do as good a job or even better!

The basic idea of a school sports program in my placement school was to make them pick up a sport, understand it, play by rules and in the process get kids to lead healthy active lifestyles. With after school and before school programs for Kho-Kho and ultimate Frisbee we sure had a good performance at the year tournaments. It doesn't have to be a sport which requires high level equipment. Any sport from kabbadi to kho-kho to gulli danda, does it. With a little investment of time energy and effort you can teach students way more valuable lessons outside the classroom.

                                       Picture Credit: Aditya Sanjay (IDEX 2013 Kho-Kho league)

Refereeing a Girls kho-kho match is no easy task. 

Sindhu from R.S.K after winning MVP

The winning Team : R.S.K Girls - It was a pleasure coaching them 

Photo cerdit: Karolle Rabarrison (Boys Cricket league 2013)

Jugaad Innovation at its best

My first train experience of travelling in a general class was all that I thought it was going to be and more.

Scenario: Its 3 PM, 6 girls are in an urgent need to get to Hyderabad from Bhopal and no last minute ‘real’ tickets are available.

The options were to either stand in a 30 people long queue to book general class tickets or to spend the night on the platform till next morning to book sleeper class tickets to Hyderabad. We valued our time more… which meant- being stuck with guthka chewing, paan eating, beedi smoking uncles and boys in a jam packed train compartment for the next 16 hours.

The lady sitting on one of the berths stretched the moment she saw us walk in, indicating she will not move. There were two men sitting near her feet, one could be her husband and the other her 4th son; she had 3 kids climbing all over her. In a general class every inch on the floor is taken, so finding an inch on the seats is out of the question. You can't expect the least bit of chivalry from Indian men. You will know that if you have ever been on an RTC bus, where the ladies seats are occupied by men and the women just stand.

Two hours into the ride the pantry guy walked in on rounds(yes,the pantry guy comes to general too, apparently) and asked us why we were not in the 'ladies compartment'? We all shouted in unison "there is a ladies compartment?". "Of course there is a ladies compartment!" I thought to myself. We were the only 6 girls with 3 old ladies in an entire compartment filled with men.

In the next few hours I experienced first hand why middle India has the potential to create great entrepreneurs and  here are 10 reasons as to why I believe so:

1. Jugaad innovation runs through our veins:  Jugaad innovation which is being adopted globally today is indigenous to our country. The middle India is so frustrated with the system that they have come up with brilliant ways to beat it. Indian railways poses many problems like poor passenger management, not having enough seats to satisfy the volumes of travelers, old compartments, not providing enough plug points to charge the cell phones(everyone in India has cell phones today) and poor bathroom facilities(the stink when you enter the door!). In my experience, the solutions to all these problems came from the people and not the government with their big RnD budgets. Even though you are constantly surrounded by people breaking rules in every which way possible, whether it be stealing electricity(maybe its generated freely through dynamos when the train moves, but its still stealing) or peeing out of the main exit door, sleeping on the luggage cabin and making yourself a new berth with a cloth hammock; you understand that it is the way of life in India and can't help but appreciate their innovative streak.

2. Proactive: Don't be fooled by their pot bellies, they are more active than they look. When it comes to their own work they will move mountains, as the saying goes. 

3. Competitive: You see this competitive me-first-attitude on the streets where if you are trying to take a U turn you need to wait an hour because everyone is trying to beat the person behind them. Most of all while standing in the queues. 

4. Frugal: From housewives to maids and tailors to doodh walas (milk man), middle India is best at cost cutting and coming up with unique ways to save money. Like carrying their own bag to the market, using the gardening pipe for the AC condenser or taking their own food during travel. Bhayya, yeah doodh mai pani hai ki paani mai doodh? (Is that water in my milk or milk in my water?) I don't know why I even bothered spending 240 rs on my general class ticket where half my compartment was travelling without tickets(no one checks for tickets in general class).

5. They have great stories to tell: When you are surrounded by real India, you hear some of the best stories they have to share. As Blake Mycoskie says in his book "Start something that matters", the ability to tell stories is the key for your product to work.

6. They are their own boss: Despite the number of times I've told people on a train not to throw trash out the window, they still do so! Right in front of me! After having just told them! They don't need anyone to tell them what to do, they are their own boss.

7. They are Flexible: Accommodating  8 people on a 4 seater.... now that's flexible!

8. They have a great support system of family, friends and community: At Namaaz time, I found people clean the little patch they could find in the middle of the coupe, and take turns one by one to do their prayer on the small piece of checkered cloth laid on the floor. With such limited place it was surprising to see how they found a square meter of block for their prayer and everyone in the on the compartment co-operated to let 20 of them take turns one after another to say their prayers. That's where unity in diversity is best demonstrated and the community approach India is made of.

9. They selfishly care for their kind: They give a lot of self importance which translates into caring for others. Most innovations or phenomena have been discovered out of a need of a specific demographic. But now reaches even people outside of the target group and global communities are befitting from it. 

10. They take calculated risks: Perhaps the stupidest example ever, but in Mumbai locals, passengers take calculated risks everyday! While climbing and hanging off the overflowing doors of a fast moving train. Even though it is a stupid thing to do, they still dared to do it, which makes them fearless.

Maximizing space:

 Maximizing resources:

The pretty view from the window of the Deccan Plateau:

Sleeping on the baggage shelf was definitely a better option than breaking my back sitting on the edge of a seat for 5 hours:

Why class pets are a great Idea!

I still remember the day like it was just yesterday. I came back from school and saw this tiny little 5 month old Dalmatian pup with a blue ribbon around his neck yelping by the doorstep. I had got him for my 11th birthday. The best birthday gift ever! We named him Spots. 

I always wanted a dog since I can remember. As a kid, I knew every dog in the colony's name and pestered my parents for my own. I even brought home street puppies on several occasions. With Spots, it all came true and on the very first day I realized that having a pet was more than just cuddling next to it while sleeping. My first time cleaning puke was not pleasant but over the next 3 months I got enough practice of cleaning puke, poop, pee and some more puke. Also being woken up at 3 or 4 in the morning for poopy time was like waking up to breast feed.

I'd race Spots every night after our walks and the reason I won best sports girl at school for four years in a row, was him. Spots was deaf and a little handicapped(he used to walk with a limp) and also the most ferocious dog in the neighborhood (so opposite our present dog Oscar). Spots used to love going out for long walks and used to often run out of the house if the gate was left open. We had to chase him all around the colony to bring him back. He used to love ice cream and chicken, and I used to love sitting next to him on the park bench for hours. 

In my late teens I was just so busy with my friends and my phone in college that walking the dogs thrice a day became such a chore. Mom often had to cover for me whenever I was out or came home late. Towards the end the ever active and ready to pounce spots got really quite. Maybe it was the presence of our new young Oscar or maybe he was just getting old. 

One day he got sick and puked. We thought he was just doing his monthly tummy cleaning, that dogs do, until..... he threw up blood. We took him to the vet and three injections and two bottles of IV later he manged to walk himself back to the car. We had to lift him to bring him into the house. He puked a little more blood. I wiped him and held him to make him feel better and not one second did I think this could be the last time I have his head on my lap, stroking him. He breathed his last on my lap. I can't describe the moment or anything else that happen after that in words, but my initial disbelief and denial did not change the fact that he was really gone. He was my baby. We buried him in one of the million bed sheets he had torn, with flowers and his favorite ice cream.  

A friend of mine gave me this poem, called the rainbow bridge when Spots passed away, which is still my favorite. I shared it with the kids the other day when they lost their class pet and only those who have loved and lost can understand why this poem is more than just words.

Most students in my school did not have pets of their own so the idea to have a class owned pet which the entire class would take care of together, was a great start. It costed below 200 rupees for a fish bowl and a gold fish. It instilled a sense of ownership, responsibility and compassion towards another living creature in them. Each student fed the fish feed daily, roll number wise and fortnightly cleaned of the bowl too. And when Nemo died we burred it with flowers. The students came back to class quieter than usual and at that moment I wondered if they felt the same way as I did with Spots.

Pet name options:

Voting for names:

The winners of how-a-fish-talks contest :

This post is dedicated to Spots. We miss you dearly and I thank you for all that you have taught me.