After Vipassana and Sangrun Village Part 1: May 4 to May 12

Note: I will be writing about my Vipassana experience in a separate post, to be uploaded at a later date. For now, I will continue blog updates from May 4^th, after my Vipassana meditation course ended.

The Vipassana course ended at 7:30 in the morning on the 4th. With no plans until my evening train, I headed in to Ichalkaranji, a nearby town to Kolhapur, with Madhuram, a student I met on the day I arrived in Kolhapur. We had chatted a bit on that day and had not talked for the next ten days, as is a requirement of the Vipassana course. We went to his house along with another student, Ravi, and spent the morning driving around the town on motorcycles and chatting about music. His mother cooked us an excellent lunch and then sent us on our way, me south to Kolhapur and Ravi north to his home near Pune. I took the public bus for an hour then was picked up at the bus station by a friend of Professor Sardeshpande’s, Mr. Ashtekar, whom I had met during my first visit to Kolhapur in January. We went back to his house and relaxed for a little while before heading across town to the house of Mutha Guruji, the guruji that had taught Mr. Ashtekar and Professor Sardeshpande’s Vipassana course one year ago. We had a great chat with him in his spacious home then had a nice dinner prepared by his family. It was great to get a chance to talk with him about my experience during the course. I mentioned I was from Seattle and he had said he had traveled there twice before, once when he had helped to set up a Vipassana center in Vancouver, BC. His second trip was for—a prize to anyone who guesses correctly—the famous Alaska cruise. Is there anyone left who has not done the Alaska cruise? It has been the “fad” of vacations during the last five years or so among people I know from around the US. What a small world.

I returned to Mumbai from Kolhapur, where I had taken my Vipassana meditation course, on the overnight train, arriving a little after noon on the 5^th. I decided to meditate for an hour and learned the hard way that meditating from 12:30 to 1:30pm in Mumbai during May with no fan on is a one-way ticket to dehydration. After drinking some Gatorade, I had lunch with Shilpa and her brother Abhishek at Hostel 8, where we as usual had some great dal tadka, bhindi fry, and paratha. If I could eat there once a week, I would never get tired of it. In the afternoon I went to the CTARA workshop briefly to talk to the lab technician Mr. More and check on my project. Another CTARA student passed the workshop and told me he was impressed with my work, saying “you broke all the CTARA records: you did 3 projects and made a prototype—no one actually makes a prototype.” I think this was a slightly pessimistic view of the average CTARA M. Tech. project, but it made me feel like my project was progressing at a reasonable rate, even if it sometimes felt otherwise.

The next few days I spent preparing for my CTARA village stay. All the students in the CTARA program go and stay in a village for 9 weeks during the summer between their first and second years. During the stay, the students take a demographic survey of households to determine their livelihood, power availability and usage, water availability and usage, level of education of each member of the household, and other related information. In addition, the students take up two directed research topics, which could include setting up a livelihood activity or doing an in-depth study of waste analysis in the village. I was to join two students for one week of their village stay to get the experience of living in an Indian village.

The village I went to stay in is called Sangrun and is located about an hour from Pune. The population is 1254, the village has 204 households, and it is located at the confluence of three rivers. This location and abundance of water for irrigation lends itself to year-round agriculture and seasonal fishing. The main crops are rice, tomatoes, eggplant, mango, and sugar cane. The CTARA students I stayed with were Aayush from Madhya Pradesh, and Aparajita from West Bengal. Aayush and I slept on the floor of the Gran Panchayat office, the government administrative office for the village, and Aparajita stayed with the Sarpanch of the village, the elected leader. Sangrun is somewhat unusual in that it has a female Sarpanch. The organizer of our stay was Mr. Sunil Bhokare, whose wife Sushma Madam was the last Sarpanch of the village. We ate most of our meals with a family who usually cooks for the school children and the hospital.

I traveled to the village on the 11^th of May, planning to stay until the 20^th. Unfortunately there were no AC buses to the place I wanted to go on the outskirts of Pune, so I took the normal government bus and sat by the window, the breeze cooling me down along the way. I had an egg pav and a mango kulfi at the stop in Lonavala, halfway between Mumbai and Pune. I will miss this type of pit stop food when I return to US road trips where the options are fast food, gas station snacks, or packaged cookies and coffee from the rest area.

Upon arrival in the village, Sunil Sir served us some corn that he and Aayush and Aparajita had recently picked from their fields. It was boiled in salt water and tasted great. I had six small ears before deciding that was enough so that I did not spoil my dinner. Dinner soon followed and consisted of a soya sabji, dal, green mango chutney, a honey-jelly mixture, chapatti, and rice. It was very good, as would be the pattern for future meals with the family. In Maharashtra, the sabji is first served with chapatti or bhakari, a flat bread made from sorghum. Next comes the rice and dal. The order is never reversed—rice is always after bread. I had observed this during my time in Mumbai, but eating in the village this pattern was even more prominent. I wonder if there is some physical reason rice and dal are eaten last, maybe related to digestion, or if it is simply a tradition that has become cemented as an unchangeable way of life.

On the 12^th, I woke up early to see the compost truck making its rounds through the village. Sangrun recently won an award from the government as the cleanest village in the region. On a weekly basis, a tractor pulling a cart drives through the streets to collect food waste and other compostable material from all of the households. Suresh Kaka (Kaka means “uncle” in Hindi), an employee in the GP office, stands behind the tractor and blows a plastic trumpet to signal that it is time for compost pickup. The village is starting a compost pile down the hill from the main road, which they eventually plan to use on the farms. The amount of compost is not nearly enough for the whole village to use on their farms, but the purpose of the collection is to keep waste off the streets, not to generate a large amount of compost. If not for this collection, much of the waste would end up in the drainage ditches. The village has a similar program for plastic collection; each month, villagers bring their collected recyclable material to the GP office, where they are paid per kg for depositing the waste. The GP office then sells this material to a recycling company at a small loss. Though the office loses money, it is a worthwhile endeavor to keep all this trash off the streets.

In the afternoon, I took a nap in the office, waking up sweating after about an hour. I learned the hard way that it is too hot to sleep in the afternoon without the fan—the power cuts out for 15 minutes or so every hour or two at seemingly random intervals. This napping and waking up when the power went out would become a daily routine for the next week.

In the evening, we narrowly escaped a rainstorm at the river’s edge and would up in a family’s home to wait out the weather. They served us poha, a puffed rice dish with turmeric and onion that has become one of my favorite snacks during the semester. I played karam, a game I had learned from Shahnawaz during one of my first weeks on campus, with their kids by the light of a flashlight. The power was out, of course, during the thunderstorm. We had a nice dinner of chicken, again by the light of a flashlight, and went to bed safe from the storm inside the GP office.