Aurangabad, The (Polish) Amazing Race, and Mom Leaves: Apr 14 to Apr 22

On the 14^th, my mom and I started the day early with a tour of the Ellora caves. These are a series of Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain caves carved out of the volcanic basalt between the 6^th and 10^th centuries. Our tour guide was a man in his 20’s named Sanjay. I was a little skeptical of hiring a guide for the cave tour, unsure that it would add much to the experience, but I was greatly mistaken—Sanjay was great and our visit to the caves would not have been nearly as interesting without him. The caves are unimaginably huge, carved out of the basalt hillside by the hands of thousands of workers with chisel and hammer. These workers included chiselers who took large sections of rock out, detailers, painters, rock carriers (rock had to be hauled out of the caves in buckets), tool sharpeners, and others needed to keep the work camp running (managers, cooks, etc.). The making of each cave must have been quite an operation.

My favorite of the caves was a Buddhist cave specially designed to have excellent acoustics. The arched ceiling, all carved out of the rock, was made to resemble a hall built with wooden beams. It was cool inside despite the 40C heat outside. Our guide Sanjay did some Buddhist chanting for us for a few minutes. It was one of the more surreal auditory experiences I have had; his voice filled the whole room easily, every note he sung echoing brilliantly around the room and producing vibrations in my body. If I had lived in the time when these caves were used for worship and had taken part in any programs in this cave, I would have been quickly converted to whatever they were teaching. The sound was that enchanting. It was especially impressive considering the lack of modern construction and auditory measurement equipment we have now. Incredible auditoriums with magnificent acoustics like Benaroya Hall in Seattle seem a little less impressive after visiting this ancient cave.

The final cave on our tour was a large Hindu temple carved out of the rock. I will let the pictures (see below) do most of the talking around this temple’s detailed carvings and size. This temple was painted during its original construction and repainted in the 19^th century. Though it greatly enhanced the appeal of the temple, much of the 19^th century paint had faded, leaving bare rock. I thought this paint job was great until I saw the small fragment of remaining paint from the 10^th century on the ceiling outside the temple entrance, much more intricate and colorful than the 19^th century paint job had been. If only all of this paint remained on the temple walls! Worshiping in this temple might not have been as audibly entrancing as the Buddhist cave I described earlier, but it would have been visually stunning.

On our way back to Aurangabad, we bought some figs from a guy on the side of the road. His price was good (Rs. 50 for 15-20 figs) and they tasted great. We drove back to Aurangabad and bought lots of spices at the factory outlet of the place where I did an energy audit earlier this semester as part of my project, hoping my mom would have room to keep them all in her bag when she traveled back to the US. In the evening, we met my friend Vinay Chawla once again and saw the improvements to his container house. He was very interested in getting my mom’s opinion, as a woman, about potential improvements to the house; so far only men had been working on and visiting the house. We ate a great dinner with the Bhutanese students at MIT Aurangabad and were given a couple woven baskets from Bhutan as a gift. They were eager to try my mom’s cookies, the fulfillment of “US cooking” I had promised them on my earlier visit.

On the 15^th, we began the day with a trip to the Paithan silk factory, but not before opening birthday presents in the MIT guest house. It was great to get this little taste of home after having lived in India for over three months. At the silk factory, it was amazing to watch the women weaving sarees and shawls by hand, all bright-colored and some intricately designed. The weavers train for 9 months in the factory before beginning to produce sarees for real. During our visit we saw the training room as it was starting up—the thing that struck me most was the many little kids walking around the large room, trying to entertain themselves while their mothers weaved practice sarees. There was a day-care at the factory, but it had not opened yet for the day.

In the afternoon, we met Professor Waykar, an expert on bees, at Manathwada University in Aurangabad. He specializes in bee-sting therapy; bee venom, when applied at particular places on the body, has many healing powers. Diseases mentioned as helped by weekly bee stings included diabetes, arthritis, back pain, and even excess forearm fat. Professor Waykar had a few patients waiting when we arrived, and after showing us his honey-collection equipment and explaining some background about his bees, led us all to a nearby bee hive on campus. One-by-one, he plucked bees from the hive with tweezers and forced them to sting his patients at the desired location, often on the back of the neck or the lower back. The patients were stoic, not flinching during the painful process. We continued our tour by visiting a few more of Professor Waykar’s hives on campus, each housing a different type of honey bee whose stinging medicinal properties, honey-production, and pollination abilities vary widely. Each has its niche in nature, and each can be used harmoniously by humans for one purpose or another.

We returned to Mumbai on the morning of the 16^th on the overnight train from Aurangabad. This train ride was much less exciting than the last—we just slept. We had a great breakfast with Vinay Chawla’s wife Mayuri, who lives in Mumbai; she served gram-flour rolls, fresh mango, papaya, and watermelon, green mango juice with soda water, dhokla, and aloo paratha. It was a delicious welcome back to Mumbai. Mayuri was planning a visit to Aurangabad the next week to visit her husband’s completed container house. My mom headed downtown to her hotel in the afternoon.

On the 18^th, my mom came back north to the IIT campus to meet Professor Sohoni, the head of the CTARA department and the professor whose lectures my Northeastern group heard in 2014 and 2016 when we visited CTARA. It was these two lectures that inspired me to come to come back to India to spend a semester with CTARA, and I am grateful for this spark he gave me, without which I would have never learned about CTARA, let alone spend my final co-op here. My mom and I met Professor Sardeshpande’s family briefly in the evening at the guest house. They were in town to see him off to the UK the next day, where he will be taking a 2-month class at Oxford focused on small businesses and entrepreneurship. We ended the night with a dinner with Shilpa at Gulmohar, the restaurant on campus, then headed downtown where I would spend my mom’s last two nights with her in her hotel.

The next day, we went on a tour of the Kala Ghoda arts district. The tour was not quite what we thought it would be (read: not especially exciting), but the last few minutes made it more than worth it. As we were leaving a small art gallery, our guide, a small white-haired woman, pointed to two guys and said “Look, lunchboxes!” These men were dabawallahs, the men who deliver lunch to the office workers of Mumbai. The accuracy and efficiency of this delivery system has been covered by the Harvard Business Review, and is impressive to all who investigate it. Almost immediately, I noticed something was off with the dabawallahs. Instead of carrying the lunch boxes on bikes, they were carrying them on their heads in a big wooden container. Moreover, all the lunch boxes looked the same—very unusual. Finally, the delivery men were not Indian, they were white! That’s when I realized what this was—a game show similar to The Amazing Race! I quickly pulled out my phone and started taking pictures, then opened up Google Maps when the men started asking anyone they could see if they knew where Akola Chemicals was. I found it on my map, pushed by the camera man (who had quieted my mom’s excited screaming), showed them my phone, and began leading the pair to their destination. I was walking so as to not miss the building (we were only one block away). The camera man came up beside me and asked “Are you leading them,” then after I responded affirmatively, “Then run!” We ran for a few steps before reaching the building; the men ran up the stairs, lunch boxes on their heads, then a few minutes later returned down and began asking everyone if they had a car. Our guide directed them to the local train station that could get them where they needed to go. And just like that, the crew was off, cameramen in tow, leaving a wake of stunned-looking Indian observers and two overjoyed American tourists.

We later met one of the show’s crew members, who told us a bit about the competition and what time we should come back in the afternoon to see the finish. The show being filmed turned out to be the Polish version of the game show The Amazing Race. In order to avoid any copyright infringement (not sure what the rules are on this), I will not be posting pictures or descriptions of the contestants. I will do so after the season airs in fall 2017! I hope I can find the show online when it runs—I made it in a few camera shots, so I might be a Polish TV celebrity! Watching the finale in the afternoon was exciting. After colored Holi powder was shot into the air and thrown on the contestants, we found the team I had helped and got to have a brief conversation with them. They were gracious and kind, then suggested we should try the show if we ever had a chance because it had been such a great experience for them. We ended the day with a great dinner on Mohammad Ali Road of the "best tandoori chicken ever" that I described in a previous post. It was almost as good as last time (I was a little less hungry this time). After buying some honey from a sweets shop, we were given a frees sample of some delicious fig barfi (a sweet) that I will be purchasing when I again return to this area for dinner.

On the 20^th, my mom’s final day in India, we took a walk near the hotel, stopping at a Starbucks. My mom had a mango java chip Frappuccino and I had a coconut water espresso shakerato, sweetened with coconut syrup. The drinks were the same price as a Starbucks in the US, which made them much more expensive than any other drink I have purchased in India. We headed back to campus and had tea with Abebe, his wife who was visiting India for the week, and a few of the other Ethiopian students in my hallway, then spent the rest of the afternoon packing my mom’s bags to exactly 23kg each. After a final tiffin with Sumit and Shilpa, we again packed into a rickshaw with the baggage and were off to the airport.

On Friday the 21^st, Sumit and I woke up early to receive two technicians from the manufacturing company in Dhule that built the prototype of my solar roaster project. We spent the day with them in the CTARA workshop, making the receiver (made by a different manufacturer in Pune) fit with the parabolic trough from Dhule. The technicians worked very diligently and eventually were able to work out all the issues. The assembly was completed in the late afternoon. I will not have much time to test it before I leave India, but I hope to get as much data as I can before heading off to Nepal. I went to sleep at 9, earlier than I had in many weeks.

The next day I spent the morning packing for my Vipassana meditation course. I took the overnight train to Kolhapur, arriving the morning of the 23^rd. I half-slept most of the day, deposited my valuables and books in the office, and prepared myself mentally for the coming 10 days of silence.