Shekhawati Havelis, Pingyao Grand Courtyard Compounds

Over a recent school break my family and I went on a trip to Shekhawati, a region in North-west Rajasthan, and the place left such an impression on me I couldn’t stop talking about it for days. Shekhawati is a place known for its many beautiful havelis, or ornate mansions built around courtyards constructed by the affluent Marwari merchants between 1800 and 1930.

I’ve always been attracted to the Indian havelis found in Old Delhi, as they remind me very much of the hutong courtyards of Old Beijing: both types of architectures are traditional housing built around communal courtyards and found in older neighborhoods behind nondescript alleyways.  But in Shekhawati, which is nicknamed the “open art gallery of Rajasthan,” the Marwari merchants’ havelis offer something more—not only are they much more concentrated in numbers in this region, they are also more opulent and extravagant in designs, many often intricately carved and painted with colorful frescos depicting historical or mythical themes.  They opened up to me a rich legacy of a group of capable and wealthy merchants that in many ways echoed that of the Shanxi merchants of northern China.

We stumbled upon Shekhawati quite by accident, after making a last minute booking at The Piramal Haveli near Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan. The quiet, very spacious haveli hotel built in 1920s around two courtyards with very green pillared corridors soon whetted our appetite of wanting to explore more, after realizing the region is filled with similar havelis that were built even earlier than the Piramal.

We were told the region was once on a caravan route, which was what made many Marwaris living in the small towns of this region wealthy.  Although after 1820, many merchants left their families behind in search of better business opportunities elsewhere in the country, they continued to send money back to erect lavish buildings in Shekhawati, their homeland, as evidence of their success.  However, many of these havelis have now been left idle, after extended families of the Marwaris moved away en masse to join them in their new homes beginning in the 1930s, leaving the beautiful relics behind for accidental tourists such as us to ponder their past.

In the course of two, three days, in our search of these historical relics, we drove from Jhunjhunu to Mandawa, from Mukundgarh to Fatehpur, before ending in Ramgarh. Along the way we saw some magnificent, sometimes huge (double or triple-storied) havelis, as well as other smaller mansions that are equally beautiful and awe-inspiring.

As we toured these historical buildings, most of which accessible to anyone expressing an interest to go inside for a quick look, I couldn’t help drawing a mental comparison between these architectural wonders and some of the fortress-like courtyard compounds I came across in the historical town of Pingyao in China’s Shanxi Province—the Wang Family Courtyard Compound and the Qiao Family Courtyard Compound, to name a few—which were built about half a century earlier than the Shekhawati havelis. (Most of the Shanxi grand compounds were built between 1750s and 1820s.)  Among them the Qiao Family Courtyard is particularly famous, made known to the world by director Zhang Yimou’s film “Raise the Red Lantern.”

The Wang and Qiao families were two of four, five very influential business families from Shanxi who were both merchants and government officials serving Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799). Like the Marwari merchants, some of the earlier Shanxi merchants started from very humble backgrounds, building their business empires from commodities as modest as tofu.  Shanxi was a densely populated province, and many merchants learned to leave their hometown early on to travel afar to gain a living, their footprints reaching as far as Inner Mongolia, Russia, Japan and Southeast Asia.  When a policy required merchants to help procure and transport food supplies for the Ming and Qing imperial families, the enterprising Shanxi merchants jumped at the opportunity, and flourished as a result.

As their businesses became more and more successful and their influences reaching far and wide at the imperial court, they began building their lavish compounds to boast their accomplishments.  The Shanxi merchants’ grand compound constructions, which can sometimes contain close to a thousand rooms built around thirty, forty courtyards, are often much larger in scale than the havelis you see in Shekhawati, making them closer to being fortresses than mere buildings.  Perhaps because the focus of these enormous manors was more on scale, these compounds also tend to be much less ornate or elaborately decorated than their Indian counterparts.

Yet what the Marwari merchants and the Shanxi merchants both had in common, at least to me, was their human needs to bring home the glory by building lavish compounds and mansions for their families and extended families.  They say the Indians and Chinese are both very family oriented peoples.  Maybe it is this parallel and the opulent compounds they built that made me see the connection between these two groups of merchants.

Then again, people are people.  As my husband said, both the Indians and the Chinese are not very subtle peoples.  So when they are successful, they see the need to brag about it.  Perhaps as people, the Indians and the Chinese are really not that different at heart.

Wang Family Courtyard in Shanxi

A haveli in Fatehpur

 

My Take on February 13’s car attack in Delhi

I’d never been too worried about terrorist attacks in Delhi before, and neither had been my friends in the expat community.  Sure, there had been bombings of the Khan Market and the INA market before, but usually, we’d receive some sort of warnings well before hand from embassies and other organizations.  We are briefed from the very beginning to avoid crowded places or famous markets on weekends.  Besides, past attacks in India were rarely targeted at foreign high commissions or a specific nation—we always assume foreigners are somehow safe from these random attacks.

The February 13 attack on an Israeli diplomat car on Aurangzeb Road by a motorcyclist bomber, leading to the injuries of four, including two bystanders, however, did significantly change this presumption.   For starters, this is the first prominent attack on a foreign-government property in Delhi, and in this particular case, the attacker, who used a sticky bomb, was clearly going after the car because it had an Israeli Embassy license plate.  On the same day, almost at around the same time in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, a messenger for the Israeli Embassy helped diffuse a bomb planted under his car.  Some observers believe the attack could be the work of the Iranian secret service in retaliation of an Israeli attack on an Iranian nuclear scientist, who was killed by a sticky bomb only a month ago, although Iran has steadfastly denied any involvement in the attacks.

Another unprecedented fact about February 13’s blast is the route and the timing of the attack.  The Aurangzeb Road is the main road that links the Khan Market with the embassy area of Chanakyapuri and a few of the international schools in South Delhi.  This path is well traveled by many expats living in the south end of town to go to the north end for shopping and other errands.  And between 3 and 3:15 pm on a weekday such as a Monday, the day of the attack, the road is often dotted with parents traveling to schools for pickups of their young. Tal Yehoshua Koren, wife of a security official from the Israel Embassy who was injured in the unfortunate attack, in fact, was on her way to the American school to pick up her children.

A few days after the attack, separate sets of my friends who have children attending international schools in Chanakyapuri told me their cars were only a few meters behind the ill-fated Israeli Embassy car.    They all heaved a sigh of relief upon hearing the news, needless to say.  Yet talking to their kids about why this misfortune had happened to the mother of their schoolmates, they admitted, was harder.   They couldn’t explain to them why they must stay on in a country that seems so unsafe at times.  All they could say was they were so glad the children weren’t inside the car with the mother at the time of the attack.

More unnerved are the 60-plus families in the local Israeli community.  Several Israeli families I know told me they have either changed their car plates, or are only taking taxis to school or work.  One mom from the community became so nervous she begged a neighbor to allow her to park her car inside her gate, as her apartment doesn’t come with a parking space.  Another mother said the Israeli Embassy has decided to change the work schedules of staff every day in a bid to avoid further attacks.  “Every day in the morning, employees have to wait for instructions to find out what time they are to go to work,” she said.  Some whispered they have been holding meetings at discrete places, trying to come to terms with the new reality of changing terrorist tactics.

But then we’re all trying to come to terms with the gravity of living in Delhi now, particularly because two weeks into the bomb attack, investigators are still in the dark about the case.  That the attack took place in a high-security area barely 500 meters from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s residence, also offers little comfort.   One has to wonder how competent the Indian authorities are in tackling similar future attacks.  In a recent The Hindu article, Devesh K. Pandey points out how slow the special force was in responding to the February 13 bomb attack.  It took a good five minutes for the special force vans to reach the spot of the terror attack.  Till that time, policemen present at the spot had no clue about what had transpired.  Of course by then, the motor-cyclist terrorist who’d attached the bomb was long gone.

Worst, analysts suggest that the February 13’s blast marked the latest round of a campaign of covert and possibly state-sponsored, retaliatory violence between Iran and Israel, two arch enemies, and that India is being caught in cross-fire between the two countries, who are both close Indian allies.  Tension between Israel and Iran has been heightened since Israel is believed to have initiated a covert assignation campaign to slow Iran’s nuclear program, which it fears will be used against it.   Yet some critics believe India would be reluctant to directly confront Iran even if they had found links of Iranian involvement in the car attack, given the strong ties between India and Iran, with the latter being a major supplier of Indian oil.

Already, a senior Israeli official has claimed Indians are “close to fully solving the (February 13 blast) case but they are not saying so publicly” in a bid to avoid public confrontation with Tehran, according to a Times of India report today. The top Israeli official reportedly noted that the Indian security agencies, who have “already identified the owner of the motorcycle and know when the attackers arrived in India, have decided to characterize the incident as a case which, until further notice, is under investigation,” thus avoiding the pressure for release of details and the need to make serious decisions on how to proceed with the case.

If the claim is correct, those of us expats would have to brace for a likely escalated “shadow war” played out in Delhi or elsewhere in India between Israel and Iran in the future, and with the added concern that the Indian authorities might not be willing to do much about it.  It certainly paints a grimmer picture for those of us who must continue living in the city.

Already, some of my friends who live in Gurgaon say they feel luckier that they live further away from the hub of foreign diplomatic missions in the country.   Meanwhile, many of my friends who live close to the heart of the capital feel they definitely will have to watch a little more closely about where they go, and how they would choose to go about their daily routines in the future.  I tend to agree.  Next time a friend from outside of India asks me about life in Delhi, I’ll have to add the safety issue as one criterion for him and her to consider.

Jaipur Lit Fes: Chinese Voice Drown out by A Star-stubbed Circus

I’ve been going to Jaipur Lit Fes for the past three years, each time noting how much more unwieldy this event is getting to be.  This year’s author list alone is 260 names long, and they expected 70,000 or more visitors to descend upon the festival.  And honestly, if it weren’t for the lure of Geling Yan, one of the most accomplished and prolific authors to have come out of China, I would probably have stayed home and give the circus a miss.

I arrive at Diggi Palace late on the first day—a Friday—after a near-seven-hour bus ride from Delhi.  The first thing I notice at the venue is how much of the festival’s spontaneity, something the organizers take great pride in, has mostly been done away with.  Gone are the free music events. Gone as well are the free lounging areas (replaced instead by Fabindia, boutiques, and other paid outlets).  This means the tents are squeezed more tighter together, and seats at different events are even harder to come by, and that a scuffle for a priced spot can erupt at any time.

Because of the never-ending controversy over Salman Rushdie being barred from coming to the festival over his banned book “The Satanic Verses” (and later, his being barred from speaking to the event by video link), and the craze over the arrival of Oprah Winfrey, the mega star American TV talk host, even the gates of the festival venue are now blocked by thick layers of security police—a first in Jaipur Lit Fes history.

You never know whose interest the security guards are really after, however.  Are they there to protect the safety of the audience and the organizers, or are they there to spy on the event for the Muslim extremists’ sake? But one thing is ample clear: they won’t hesitate to pounce on any one trying to get too close to the “Big O.” Never mind she’s neither an author nor a publisher.  (Are the organizers that desperate to add more glitz to their already overly star-stubbed event?)

And while criticism about India’s diminishing freedom in the literary scene echoes throughout the front and back lanes of Diggi Palace, over at the more secluded Baithak Tent in one corner on the second day, Geling Yan voices her own concern about freedom of expression of another kind.

Yan, an international Chinese author who left Beijing in 1989 for a creative writing degree in the U.S. and has since been living overseas, has her first session on the morning that day under the panel “Three Voices,” sharing the stage with African writer Taiye Selasi and Indian novelist Anuradha Roy.  The moderator asks each of the authors to read from their works for ten minutes, and Yan chooses to read from “The Banquet Bug,” a satirical novel she published in 2006 about the social ills and hypocrisy of modern China.  She explains that although she’d written several Chinese works since, she wants to read from this particular one because it’s the only work she’s written in English, which she thinks is fitting for the audience at the festival.

In “Banquet Bug,” Yan presents a portrait of a corrupt Beijing where the nouveaux riches, profiting from China’s economic reforms, munch on raw fish presented on the backs of naked young maidens, all this while the poor sell pints of their own blood to get by.  Everything in the capital also seems to be a con: prostitutes posing as virgin college girls, soy sauce made from human hair, and unschooled migrants workers posing as journalists to freeload on banquets and “money-for-your troubles” in exchange for the promise of favorable press.

In passing, Yan mentions the novel has subsequently been translated into Chinese by a Taiwanese translator  and published in Taiwan, though critics bemoan the fact that the language of the translation is horrible, a far cry from the author’s own elegant Chinese prose.  That’s when someone in the audience raises an interesting, and very legitimate question: “if you can write Chinese beautifully, why did you choose to write this novel in English?”

Yan smiles and says she decided to try her hand at writing in English because she wasn’t sure if she could get away with writing about many of China’s modern-day problems in the Chinese language.  “I also found writing in English very liberating, giving me the sense of freedom I didn’t feel when writing in the Chinese language.”   Having lived in the U.S. and elsewhere for over twenty years, it seems Yan has not only managed to return to her home country with a fresher, more critical eye, but also managed to find an alternative voice to get around the censor bureau.  Perhaps her alternative voice has served her well, because the Chinese censor bureau never came after her.  Or maybe they were busy cracking down on more hard-hitting works by the likes of Yan Lianke, author of the banned novel “Dream of Ding Village”—a work about the sad lives of AIDS sufferers in Chinese villages; or Liu Xiaobo, a literary critic and political activist as well as the Nobel Peace Prize winner of 2010 who’s currently serving an 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.”

Yan’s remarks about the need to constantly think about ways to get around China’s censor bureau as a Chinese writer could have led to an interesting debate about literary censorship and freedom of expression in China.  But Urvashi Butalia, the moderator who herself is a writer, is ill-prepared to follow up with any intelligent questions to spur meaningful discussions.  A lost opportunity! It’s such a pity, especially given much of the clamor this year is all about freedom of expression the world over.

Then again, it’s not really Butalia’s fault.  From my experiences from previous years, many of the panels are run much like this one at “the greatest literary show on earth.”  Panelists, whose works have nothing in common with one another either in themes or subject matters, it seems, are hastily lumped together simply because the organizers don’t know what else to do with them. Hence you have sessions with such dubious and uninspiring titles as “Three Voices.”  By the time you add hosts brought over to the stage at the last minute, and you get half-baked results.

If you ask me, the event organizers of the lit fes would be well served to channel their energy better in the future on how best to create meaningful debates with authors and hosts given more time for preparations, not how many more Bollywood celebrities and TV show hosts they can get to come to this circus.  After all, this is a literary event, not some glitzy tourist trap.

Geling Yan speaking with Urvashi Butalia before the "Three Voices" panel discussion.

African Air Rage with Chinese Characteristics

On January 6, my husband, our two kids and I arrived late at Addis Ababa Airport to change planes for our final flight home.  After three weeks holidaying in South Africa’s Johannesburg and Cape Town, we were eager to go home to Delhi.  But we weren’t quite prepared for what was to greet us at the Ethiopian airport.

At the departure area, there were a few dingy-looking souvenir shops down the narrow hallway.  And though we were tired, we had close to four hours to kill, so we took to browsing these shops.  In one corner of a shop, we discovered shelves after shelves of long white boxes bearing Chinese characters—they turned out to be Chinese Zhonghua brand cigarettes.  More intriguingly, this shop was not the only one selling them.  Two, three other shops at the airport also carried them. I was amused: do they really get so much traffic from the Chinese tourists here?

“Yao bu yao yan?” My answer came a few minutes later, when an Ethiopian shopkeeper asked in perfectly understandable Chinese to a slew of incoming Chinese men if they might want to buy some cigarettes.  If the shopkeepers bothered to learn the necessary Chinese phrases to help customers, this must be serious business.  I looked at these men and decided that they must be migrant workers because they were dressed rather shabbily, their faces tanned from overexposures to the sun.

Soon, the shops and the waiting areas were filled with the Chinese workers—there were over a hundred of them.  They seemed to have arrived from all over, and were waiting for their next flights. But where have they come from and where were they headed, and why were they traveling in such great numbers?

I posed my questions to a friendly-looking man in his thirties, and he told me he’s from Jiangsu, a southern town, and was heading home after fulfilling a year’s contract of working in Angola at a construction site.  Another man looking to be in his early forties and from Henan, another southern Chinese province, said he’d been working for two years in Central African Republic building roads.  He told me he made 80,000 RMB (roughly 10,000 dollars) a year with benefits.  “But my contract’s up and it’s time to head home,” he said with a smile, adding he’s looking forward to returning home for the Chinese New Year. That’s when I remembered the Lunar New Year falls on January 23^rd this year.  Clearly the massive movement of heading home for the most important festivities of the year has already started with many Chinese migrants, with the exported Chinese labor force spearheading the trend.

It dawned on me that the flight we were taking would fly on to Hangzhou, a major southern city of China, after a brief stop in Delhi.   Could it be that many of the Chinese migrant workers we saw at the waiting area would be sharing the flight with us?  My guess was proved correct because a few minutes later, at around midnight, I saw many of the familiar Chinese faces boarding our plane.  After a long layover, we were happy to finally get moving.  Little did we know what was yet to come.

The first sign of trouble came about 30 minutes after we were scheduled to take off.  The co-pilot came on the PA system and mumbled something about having AC problems, but assured us they would soon be fixed.

Two hours later, another pilot came on and demanded us to deplane—back to the airport again.  Mind you, this whole time we weren’t offered one drop of drinks, much less any food. They also didn’t say when we might expect to get back on board, or if we might have to wait for a different plane.  But the 200 plus passengers willingly trooped back to the airport because the pilot had promised someone at the gate would “make appropriate arrangements” for us.  That turned out to be an empty promise. Not only weren’t there any agents to greet us, one Ethiopian Air agent, who happened to be passing by the departure area refused to be helpful, even though some of us, including me and a handful of Indian and African passengers, voiced our grievances.

By now, the groups of Chinese passengers became visibly agitated.  Several of them, including a couple of women, raised their arms in a fury, shouting to the lone agent: “We are not animals.  Treat us right.  We want five-star hotels.  We want human rights.”  After that some started to huddle together to discuss among themselves, clearly over strategies to draw attention, anything to get the airline to quickly resolve the problem.  I squeezed my way into the crowds to listen to their discussion, and all I heard was ‘check-point’ and ‘don’t let this agent off our sight.’

At one point, I asked one woman why there was the need to shout and get angry, and her answer was, the group’s previous flight had also been horribly delayed, and they were denied any just compensation.  “We’re really fed up with their (the Africans’) ways of doing things.  And if we don’t show some toughness, they’ll think they could take advantage of us Chinese, ” she said, adding they only got what they wanted at the previous airport after having corned a manager and threatened to beat him up.

Ah, it’s the age-old national pride thing again.  I remember an Internet article once pointed out that the Chinese arrogance and rudeness towards Africans is not usually racially motivated, but is more stemmed from a fear of being seen as weak because they aren’t white.  “If they ask you to do something and you don’t do it, they think you’re not doing it because they aren’t white,” a Zambian politician was quoted as saying in the article.  (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1063198/PETER-HITCHENS-How-China-created-new-slave-empire-Africa.html#ixzz1jh0mlEku)

When the lone Ethiopian agent disappeared into a stairwell, suddenly the groups of Chinese migrants, about sixty or eighty of them, all rushed to a security check point from where we all had to go through before boarding our plane.  They formed a human wall and began blocking the way out of the check point, making it impossible for any one, including passengers on other flights, to pass through.  Meanwhile, leaders from the groups began barking their demands to the security agents in broken English, insisting that the Ethiopian Air personnel come to them immediately.

There were some scuffles, but soon, some agents in suits appeared.  Words were exchanged, though the Chinese clearly didn’t like what they heard.  “We want food.  We want to go home, NOW,” they yelled.

This near-riot lasted for about thirty minutes, until one security agent told a few of us spectators that the plane had been fixed and we could go back and board the plane once again.   But the caveat was, we must go through security clearance the second time.  We did this at another check point far away from where the Chinese had staged their standoff. Before we boarded the plane, I heard someone from the Chinese groups yelling that they mustn’t go through security clearance the second time because “it’s unreasonable” and “infringing on our rights.”

After another two hours of excitement at the airport, my family and I were all too happy to get back to our seats on the plane and finally have a few drinks and some nuts to munch on.  But we weren’t going anywhere because the majority of the Chinese migrants still weren’t on board.   It was another 45 minutes before they finally got on the plane.  But did they get their way?

By then, I was too tired to poke around to find out if the Chinese had managed to save their face.  I was just glad that we were finally air-borne.  I looked at my watch—it was nearly four in the morning.

So what did I come away with this encounter with the Chinese mobs at the airport? On the positive side, it’s interesting to see that the migrants are learning quickly about equal treatments and the way of the world during their stints working overseas. The Chinese government will have much to worry about when more and more of these former farmers return home.  It will be a welcoming change which will surely help usher China quicker into a freer, more just society.

On a more worrying note is how easily a large group of Chinese migrant workers can be incited into riots and violence in the name of face and national pride.   What we witnessed at Addis Ababa was but a small window to many possible scenarios at factories and construction sites across Africa.  In Africa, there’s already a growing resentment over the use of large-scale imported Chinese labor on a continent that’s ravaged by poverty and joblessness, a trend that was started as far back as 1970s. While concrete numbers and figures are not well known, economists estimate that in Zambia alone, there are tens of thousands of imported Chinese laborers.   Frictions due to cultural differences and prejudices from both sides will no doubt further erode relationships between the Chinese and many of their African “friends,” a bad situation made worse.

 

Where Are All the Chinese Hiding in Delhi?

Where do the Chinese live in Delhi? From time to time, I’d come across this question from curious expats and Indians alike.  I wonder about that very question myself.  Just who are they, and where and how do they live in the capital of India?

I belong to a very small group (about six or seven) of mostly expat Chinese wives/working women married to NRIs, foreign nationals and other Chinese professionals who have been on overseas assignments for at least a decade.  I also know a few Chinese embassy friends through my connections with the international schools here.  But surely there are more Chinese than the sixty-plus diplomats and support staff living in Chanakyapuri’s Chinese Embassy, and the few Chinese wives I know in our circle.

From researching an article I did sometime ago, I know for a fact that there are roughly a hundred Chinese students scattered in the Outram Lines neighborhood near Delhi University.  (See ‘CHANGING PERCEPTIONS – Indian universities draw Chinese‘ in Mint, originally appeared on Oct 26, 2011)  Many of these students are hoping to learn some English while taking advantage of the cheaper university tuitions here.

I also heard a rumor that many of the working Chinese tend to live among the high rise buildings in Gurgaon.  So over the weekend, I invited myself to the residence of a Miss P in a rather posh-looking apartment complex near M.G. Road.

Ms P, hailed from China’s Hunan Province, tells me that she works for a large Chinese telecom company located in one of the DLF city complexes. Because of the location of her office building, she and her colleagues are given lodgings just a stone throw away from the office.  The apartments, each comes with three to four bedrooms and individual private bathroom, are rented for them free of charge by their company, though the workers must share each unit with two or three other colleagues, essentially making them functioning more like dormitories than private homes, Ms P says.

When I arrived at P’s apartment, her husband, who works with her at the same company, and another colleague from Fujian, were lounging on their sofa sipping tea and surfing the Internet.  Furniture there is basic and limited, but adequate enough for employees who typically stay for one or two years.  Ms P says at this particular complex, there are about 100 other colleagues sharing similar apartments like hers.  Other employees are scattered in a couple of different apartment housings nearby.  All in toll, there are about 150 Chinese from her company living in the general area of Gurgaon, she says.

But that’s only counting those from her company.  Another Chinese telecom company, which has an even bigger representation in north India than Ms Z’s, has probably two times as many Chinese employees living either in the vicinity of her apartment complex, or further down south in Gurgaon, she adds.  If you do the math, that’s roughly 450 Chinese living in Gurgaon alone.  According to Ms P, the majority of Chinese living in Gurgaon tends to be engineers and other IT professionals working for these two big Chinese telecom companies, making the area one of the most concentrated Chinese communities in India.

Before I parted ways with Ms P, I asked her the one question that all Chinese ask each other in a foreign country: what do you do about food?  Ms P says that’s not a worry—the company provides two sumptuous Chinese meals at the company cafeteria, thanks to the employment of two professional Chinese chefs.  Everyday from Monday to Friday, for the small fee of 100 rps, Chinese employees get to eat lunch at 12:30 pm and dinner at 6:00 pm if they so desire.   (Lucky her! Only two bucks for the real deal!  Not some imposter Chinese dishes at phenomenal prices. )

On weekends, shopping for food and cooking together with roommates is a form of entertainment.  She says every Saturday and Sunday, if I went to a supermarket at a nearby MGF mall around 3 or 4 pm, that I’m bound to run into a few fellow Chinese.  Gee—what a concept!  I bet many even at the Chinese Embassy didn’t know this bit of crucial info about their own compatriots.

Just when I thought I’d discovered all there is to discover about the local Chinese communities in Delhi and Gurgaon, I stumbled upon yet another one a couple of days ago.  This one is around the Karol Bagh metro station—a neighborhood I least expected to see many Chinese.

I met a Mr. A at a friend’s party recently, and it was he who introduced me to this community.   According to A, who lives around the area, Koral Bagh is home to roughly 100 Chinese professionals dispatched by cell phone companies or other telecom service-related firms based either in Shenzhen or Guangzhou.  It makes sense, Karol Bagh being such a “mobile hub of Delhi.”  Rent is cheap here, according to A, only about 600 dollars for a three bedroom apartment.

Most of the Chinese folks who live in this neighborhood tend to be single young guys in their 20s or early 30s.   But because the companies they work for are likely to be very small and lacking in resources, these guys typically don’t get much support in lodging or food services from their employers.

This lack of support can be a source of great stress for some Chinese, especially those who can neither cook nor afford to eat at an authentic but frightfully expensive local Chinese restaurant.  Mr. A, a Hunan native who claims to be a good chef, has his own solution.  Every now and then he would call for a pot-luck Chinese party with four or five Chinese friends at his apartment to share home-cooked regional dishes.  When we chatted over breakfast at his apartment, he was salivating over the prospects of eating many fine dishes that evening with a Cantonese friend who evidently cooks a very mean Hainanese style chicken.

It appears to me many single guys hailed from the Middle Kingdom (yes, there are a lot more guys than gals sent over to work in Delhi and Gurgaon) have learned to be better at picking up a spatula or a wok here, especially those who aren’t blessed with readily available company-provided Chinese meals.  This is certainly the case with the Karol Bagh crowd, and so is the case with the students living in the vicinity of Delhi University.   Indian curries, after all, are not something many local Chinese say they can handle on a daily basis.

I don’t know if there are more Chinese communities like the ones in Karol Bagh and Outram Lines hidden somewhere in the Delhi, but I intend to get to the bottom of this.     I shall share more findings about this subject in the near future, so stay tuned.

India’s Whirlwind Revolving Door

The last couple of weeks my husband and I have been so busy with farewell parties we were literarily doing three parties on one day.  Every year around May and December, it seems like expat folks are leaving Delhi en mass, all looking for greener pasture.  Then again, we have been losing friends since January.  All in toll, we’ve lost nearly twenty friends and acquaintances already, and the year is not over yet.  Some of the friends we’re losing are those we’ve made a connection with and meant to get to know better, and voila, before we know it, they’re exiting the door—rather sad and demoralizing really.

I don’t remember Beijing being such a fast revolving door.  Folks there seem to stay longer—at least four years, most averaging five years; whereas in Delhi, the average duration of stay seems to be between two and three years.  So what’s with that?

When I ask friends that question, especially those who have also lived in China (we get quite a few of those, in fact), some of them suggest that maybe it’s because China is a more popular destination, given that it’s doing better economically than India, and naturally more companies would want to send their people there, and for longer periods of time in order to better develop their businesses there.

There’s definitely some truth to that.  But I have to wonder if it’s not also because China is inherently a more challenging destination than India, it not being an English-speaking country,  which means people who are sent there are often required to do some sort of language training.  Some journalist friends of ours who work for certain large U.S. newspapers, for example, received a six-month language course before commencing on the job in Beijing.  This, in turn, ends up being an added investment on the part of the company.  That being the case, many international companies, I suspect, want to get their money’s worth by making sure their employees are staying in China longer.

Going to China also demands more involvement on the part of the individuals.  By the time individual employees have committed six months or more in learning Chinese, with or without their companies help, many people may have developed emotional attachments to the country and the culture.  In that sense, I think Japan is very much like China, as the Japanese language is equally demanding of individual’s time and commitment, it being a very tough language to learn also.

India, on the other end, is an English-speaking country.  Without having to spend the extra money on language courses, this makes it very easy for international companies to send or retract their employees anytime at will.  And it’s not just the companies—it’s also the individuals too, who tend to look at India as part of the bigger, former British colonial cluster.  Many who leave India will likely end up going to another English-speaking, former British colony such as Singapore, Malaysia, or Dubai.   It makes leaving that much easier if you haven’t struggled in the language-acquisition process, or haven’t made a substantial emotional investment in the culture.

Gender Empowerment is Key to India’s Overpopulation Challenge

In the past couple of weeks newspapers both near and far have been splashed with headlines about the world’s burgeoning population, which, according to United Nation’s demographers, have reached 7 billion on October 31—at least two, three years sooner than earlier predictions.

The human race has been multiplying at ever more alarming speed.  If the first billion of people took us nearly two thousand years to reach, (1804 to be exact) then the most recent billion reportedly having only taken 12 years.  The tremendous human impact on all aspects of bio-sphere amounts to the biggest crisis ever to face the planet.  The added carbon emissions alone will have a devastating effect on climate change.

Worst, experts noted the majority of the births are now happening in developing countries least able to cope with the resource and environmental consequences. An UN report predicts that world population will hit 9.1 billion by 2050, with India and Pakistan seeing the biggest increases.  Already India is home to 17.3 percent of the world’s population, even though it only has 2.4 percent of the world’s land area.  (For the record, China has 22 percent of the world’s population and 6.3 percent of the world’s land area)  Although India’s fertility rate has come down dramatically over the past decades, it still registers at 2.6 in 2011, well above the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.  By 2040 or sooner, India will overtake China as the world’s most populous nation with 1.52 billion people.  Talk about overcrowding.

As China’s fertility rate has already slid to 1.54, demographers and green environmentalists’ attention is now focused on India: just what must the country do to address its overpopulation challenge?

Critics such as New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof (International Herald Tribune, Nov. 4, 2011) suggest family planning programs as a key solution, citing how they have helped push Indian women’s fertility from 6 in 1950 to the current rate of 2.6.   But history shows that top-down birth control programs typically bring very mixed results, and sometimes with devastating consequences. One obvious example is China’s very controversial one-child policy, implemented in 1979.  Yes, China’s one-child policy has helped prevent at least 400 million births during the past 30 years, at least according to government figures.  But the extreme policy has also resulted in a rapid ageing society with a dearth of young care-takers.

Another serious effect of China’s policy is the huge gender imbalance—a result of many female fetuses having been aborted, or girl babies being abandoned and subsequently taken out of the country as adopted children.  Now many Chinese men face the daunting prospect of not being able to find wives.

Less well known is that India has also courted with extreme birth control measures in recent history.   During India’s state of emergency between 1975 and 1977, an infamous family planning initiative was introduced by Sanjay Gandhi, son of Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India.  This included forcibly dragging poor men and women to the operating theaters in makeshift tents for sterilization, and police surrounding entire villages at night and herding the villagers into camps.   In fact, one of my Indian friends admitted to me recently that her mother, a school teacher, was once involved in identifying women for such forcible surgeries, with the quota being two women a day.  Her mother was told she couldn’t expect a promotion unless she fulfilled her quota.  The program caused an outcry and a lasting backlash against any initiative associated with family planning.

Even today, India continues to use a combination of carrots and sticks to carry out sterilization drives, with women bearing the brunt of the burden.   In the Indian state of Rajasthan, for example, health officials are offering cheap locally made cars, motor cycles, food blenders and televisions as a lure in an attempt to sign up 20,000 couples for sterilization.

Yet in a country with deep patriarchal roots, where gender inequality continues to compare poorly with the rest of the world, (India was placed 129^th among 146 countries in terms of Gender Inequality Index, lagging behind neighboring Sri Lanka and even Pakistan, according to UNDP figures from 2011) it’s the women who end up being pushed by their husbands to the operating theaters in exchange for the lucrative prize.  According to the most recent health ministry statistics, a larger than expected dip in recent years in men wanting to get involved in family planning means women sterilization remains the mainstay of India’s population program.

More disturbingly, as more Indian couples begin to embrace smaller size families, either by force or by choice, the gender ratio of the nation has become more skewed, with India now having unnaturally large numbers of boys, much like what China has been experiencing.   A recent Economist article entitled “Gendercide: The War on Baby Girls” explains how a product of three forces: the ancient preference for sons, a modern desire for smaller families and the availability of ultrasound scanning technologies that identify the sex of a fetus, have combined to push for greater incidences of female infanticide since the 1980s both in India and China, as well as in other Asian and African countries:

“In societies where four or six children are common, a boy would almost certainly come along eventually; son preference did not need to exist at the expense of daughters.  But now couples want two children—or, as in China, are allowed only one—they will sacrifice unborn daughters to their pursuit of a son.  That is why sex ratios are most distorted in the modern, open parts of China and India.” (http://www.economist.com/node/15636231)   Largely as a result of this practice, there are an estimated 80 million missing girls alone in China and India.

Meanwhile, in rural parts of India and China, where contraceptive means are not always available, many families continue to have multiple babies in the hopes of procuring a son, which not only pushes birth rates up, but also leads to abandonment of many “unwanted” new-born girls or the neglect of daughters.  Such practice is particularly prevalent in families where poverty has limited the number of desired children.

Rather than relying on enforced population control measures, which more often than not act selectively against women and tend to lead to atrocious abortions rates of females and infanticide, emphasis should be put on voluntary family planning and women’s education instead.

It is a well recognized fact that women’s education is one of the biggest factors in reducing fertility.  Many scholars have pointed out that when a woman’s education level rises, she tends to marry late, have fewer babies, possess better knowledge about contraceptives and is better able to plan her family.  The correlation between education and fertility rate is amply demonstrated in the southern Indian state of Kerala, which has the highest literacy rate of India, with 92 percent for women and 96 percent for men, as well as the nation’s lowest fertility rate at 16.7.  The state also has one of the most favorable sex ratios in the country at 1084, compared with the national average of 940.

Providing quality and readily available health care to children and contraceptive information to women, especially those living in rural parts of India, is another key to solving the overpopulation problem.  The World Fertility Survey of 1984 indicated that many mothers in developing countries did not want any more children, but were not able to have easy access to safe, effective and affordable contraceptive aids or reproductive health information.  Once these services become available, women will voluntarily want to have fewer babies.

Likewise, birth rates will also fall heavily if young children, often seen as pension plans by the poor, have a lower mortality rate, which would make it unnecessary for parents to have multiple children in order to offset the problem that some of them may not survive into adulthood.

Strict laws against the century-old dowries system and abolition of child marriages, which continue to be very common in India, as well as more supportive laws for women to inherit properties are also needed if the strong son-preference of Indian parents is to be corrected.  But again, none of these measures would be successful without India first focusing on raising Indian women’s education level.

According to the latest UNDP Report, only about 27 percent of Indian women aged over 25 have had a secondary education.  India’s education index is lower than that of neighboring Bangladesh (30.8) and lags far behind any of the other BRICS nations.

As Ashish Bose, a veteran Indian demographer, is quoted as saying in a recent Business Standard article, rather than returning to enforcement of birth control and targeted sterilization, India’s “first priority should be compulsory literacy” and the second, “the enrolment and upgrading the quality of education and teachers.”  Along with this there should be investment in health care “so that children don’t continue to die in droves, forcing people to have more children.”  (http://www.business-standard.com/taketwo/news/are-we-too-many/455144/)

Yes, population measures aimed at education, empowerment of women and health care system will all take time.  But the non-pervasive and constructive approach will pay off for India big time in the long run.