Ponticulus Indica

These days, I try to sew some good seeds wherever I am. Every so often, I get lucky an am able to put down more than just seeds, and yesterday was one such day.

My in-laws have a backyard literally larger than a football field, and spend 2 hours and a couple gallons of gasoline each week to mow the colossal lawn on a riding lawnmower. Last week, I convinced them that putting in fruit trees was a better use of space and energy and yesterday we put in the first of many trees.

We put in a granny smith Apple tree, Red Fuji Apple tree, and a Golden Delicious Apple tree, and plan on putting in 9 more!

Too much meat, says New York Times writer Mark Brittman in his TED Talk. Not because its bad for your health (even though it is), but because its destroying the planet. Who knew that Americans slaughter 10 billion cows, pigs, and chickens each year!?

Brittman places the meat industry as the #2 cause of global warming after electricity generation, while others include the power consumption and transport energy used in the meat industry to place it at the #1 cause of climate change.

Last year the New York Times wrote a story on vegetarian groups coalescing around the climate message to push the case that “there’s no such thing as a meat-eating environmentalist” while simultaneously hedging to prevent alienating the carnivorous masses. Even I’ve previously blogged about the ethics of meat consumption, while stopping short of calling it a moral issue for the same reasons. Yet these days, it seems even Oprah is going vegan for 21 days, largely for moral and experimental reasons as the preponderance of scientific evidence linking meat to planetary destruction more overwhelming than ever.

It may finally be safe to call diet a moral issue in America.

Read the text in the bottom right corner.

If only the thousands trapped during the recent Chinese earthquake knew how to meditate.

Read the full story via the Times Online.

Hand-washing clothes in India is part of the daily drudgery for hundreds of millions of housewives who can’t afford the ‘professional’ male dhobis (or the electric washing machines) that urban middle-class & elites employ for laundry. The process is inefficient not just in terms of time, but also water usage and it often accounts for nearly half of a household’s daily water requirements. In a hot country with a billion thirsty mouths where most homes get running water for about 2 hours a day (if at all), saving water by making laundry more efficient should be a top priority.

Enter the Honeybee Network and National Innovation Foundation (NIF).

Spearheaded by IIM Professor Anil Gupta, the Honeybee Network takes teams of volunteers on exploratory journeys through rural India where they scour the countryside for innovations that they hope to spread to other parts of the country. When innovations have commercial value, they pass the product on to the NIF (also sprearheaded by Anil Gupta) which aims to streamline the manufacturing process and formalize the intellectual property so that an entrepreneur can easily & efficiently buy the rights to bring the product to market.

Except there is nothing easy or efficient about it.

The Honeybee Network found Remya Jose more than 4 years ago in rural Kerala. Faced with an ailing mother and the demands of continuing her high school education, Remya developed a pedal-powered washing machine that saves time, energy, and water as a 10th grade student in rural Kerala. Through NIF’s instrumentality, her innovation was featured in Outlook magazine in 2005 followed by a Discovery Channel feature, an NDTV story, an even an award from India’s then-President, Abdul Kalam. With all that attention, you would think Remya machine would be all over India by now, and she would be collecting royalties amounting to millions of rupees.

Think again.

The NIF ‘helped’ re-design Remya’s washing machine from a device that cost Rs. 1500 to manufacture from scratch in rural india, to machine that cost Rs. 3000 to make in an urban factory. Since it would be competing with low-end single-cycle electric washing machines that cost Rs. 5000, it’s price-point is above what India’s poor can afford while simultaneously being below what the middle class demands when compared to the Rs. 5000 electric alternative. A wonderful case study in perfectly sub-optimal pricing.

Further, though the NIF helped to patent Remya’s intellectual property, the licensing agreement is designed so that NIF recovers its ‘investment’ on Remya’s innovation by taking a percentage of payments and royalties, adding another layer of expense and complication to something they ostensibly work to simplify.

NIF boasts a small handful of success stories, including generating attention in the mainstream Indian press and sparking interest among socially-engaged Indian youth. Yet it remains an open question as to whether their successes outweigh their failures, and the few opportunities they have created make up for the glaring missed opportunities of the effort.

Besides Remya’s washing machine, other innovations they have failed to capitalize on include a mobile phone-activated irrigation pump that saves farmers from manually turning on & off the water to their fields, a system to eliminate train accidents on Indian railways, a geared pedal rickshaw for faster transport with less effort, and a floating bicycle that can save lives during floods. Some of the early press coverage quotes Anil Gupta and others lamenting the huge untapped potential of rural innovators, but lacking in the candor to admit how much NIF’s own systems, processes, and personnel are part of the problem.

I approached the NIF in mid-2007 to find innovative products to demo and advertise (at no-cost!) on our newly-created social marketing platform, Lok Darshan. We were looking for products that would help the poorest of the poor, and the pedal washing machine definitely had the potential to lift people out of poverty through creation of efficient dhobi micro-enterprises. Besides a partnership that would get their products seen by the urban poor of Ahmedabad who would actually demand them (as opposed to the middle & upper-classes on Discovery & NDTV for whom the innovations were mere entertainment), I also seriously looked into purchasing the intellectual property for Remya Jose’s pedal washing machine despite the unfavorable conditions that NIF had created. After enthusiastic meetings and a few rounds of email exchange, communication with NIF dropped off with the following message from NIF’s national business development manager:

“Dear Mr. Brown,
We do agree in principle, We are discussing with our team for follow up. We need your patience and allowance for more delay from our side.”

My follow-up several weeks later yielded no response, and I’m still waiting patiently.

To his credit, Anil Gupta seems genuinely interested in serving India and in uplifting the poorest of the poor. Yet for an organization working with innovators, NIF has remained remarkably stagnant in the way it operates, and its staff lacks the creativity and vision that its clients bristle with.

The enterprising, brave, and patient should try their own hand by reviewing NIF’s list of products to see if they have any more success in bringing innovation to market.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be surprised if Alex Gadsen’s Cyclean beats Remya Jose to the Indian mass market.

Imagine hardened criminals breaking down in remorse for their crimes, and hugging the guards that they hated just a week earlier. That kind of transformation began when mediation was introduced into India’s most notorious prison near New Delhi, India.

Today most of our prisons are just “prisoner schools” where convicts get together and learn how to be better criminals, while taxpayers ironically spend more to keep them locked up than what it would have cost to send them through Harvard University. Most prisons are simply not set up for rehabilitation, much less transformation.

Enter Vipassana.

Doing Time, Doing Vipassana is the decade-old documentary film made about Vipassana meditation’s first introduction into prison. While the film definitely has its agenda and makes the transformation seem easier than it is, it’s honest about the technique not being magic and is worth a view if you are interested in progressive prison reform.

Critics argue that prison meditation isn’t possible in America, but a small number of facilities have added 10-day silent meditation courses, and a new film called Dhamma Brothers shows was happens when ‘East Meets West in the Deep South’.

Doing Time, Doing Vipassana

part 2, 3, 4, 5

Lok Darshan is an experiment in socially-relevant media. In this experiment, kids from Ramapir-no-tekro (Gujarat’s largest slum), were trained in video production so they could make empowering and engaging content for the slum community in video news magazine format. The 30-minute programs were then taken into the slum and narrowcast in any location where between 300 – 1000 people could gather, using a portable projector and audio system. In one month, 7,200 – 24,000 people can be reached directly with this method. Many more people are reached through broadcasts on local public-access cable. The program also becomes a platform to advertise appropriate technology that has the potential to make make improvements in the lives of slum dwellers.

The Need for Lok Darshan

In the slums, many people have televisions. Many have cable TV or even satellite TV. They watch the same Hollywood and Bollywood programming under their leaky tarp and tin roofs (or worse) that we watch from the comfort of our homes. The difference between our viewership and theirs is that nothing that they see on television is a reflection of their own lives. None of the dramas are the types of scenes that occur in their world. None of the locations look like places they see or have ever been. None of the characters come from their class (or caste). None of the products advertised on TV are things that are even directed towards them.

The result is that TV programming is a subtle, but potent and persistent psychologically disempowering force in their lives. It emphasizes and re-emphasizes the message that they are nobody’s, that they don’t matter, that nothing in this world is for them. In rare instances where their world is portrayed, it is always in a negative way, showing their community as the source of the latest city-wide pandemic, or as the site of some crime, or as a scene of poverty or calamity. This overt negative portrayal adds more heavily to the subtle dehumanizing message already continuously coming from television and is a source of feelings of inferiority, helplessness, hopelessness, depression, and even anger.

In fact, slums have their own internal news networks that don’t rely on mass media. Whenever bad news happens, it spreads like wildfire through the chatter of gossip. Something bad is happening somewhere in the slum on any given day, and so not only is everyone in touch with a disempowering mass media, but they’re also receiving a continual stream of news about the faults and failures of people in their own environment. The results are dire. When everything in your world gives you a negative message about yourself, you start to believe it. And that robs you of your inherent power to improve your life.

Yet the reality is that every home in the slum has something positive happening in it everyday. There are countless local heroes who work to help others in their community everyday. There is wisdom, love, knowledge, and inspiration at every narrow gully and nook. Goodness is everywhere, but what is in short supply are people who highlight the goodness and bring people’s attentions back to the positive and proactive forces in their world.

That’s where Lok Darshan comes in.

Lok Darshan is focused on creating media that empowers the slum community, gives them good news, shares vital knowledge with them that can change their lives for the better, and inspires them with shining examples from their own environment and community.

The Journey

Lok Darshan was inspired by our friends Stalin K. and Jessica Mayberry from Drishti Media Collective and Video Volunteers. Drishti and VV pioneered in the development an approach to media that involves the community through ‘Community Video Units’ (CVUs). Each CVU is paid for by the sponsoring NGO at approximately $25,000 for the first year. This includes equipment, setup, and a year worth of salaries for everyone involved. The NGO and its constituent community elect people to serve as their community reporters, who then are trained and work toward developing news magazines that serve the interests of the NGO and its contributors.

Lok Darshan is a variation on the CVU theme. We began as just two people with some media skills, some saved up money, and our own videography equipment and laptops. To that, we added a small paid staff, and attracted a growing group of volunteers that enabled us to run more cheaply than a standard CVU. We value input from Manav Sadhna, the NGO we work closely with, but take no money from it. As a result, we are free to develop content that stays true to our mission of serving the slum community without necessarily having a linkage to the NGO’s non-slum-related activities or agenda. There is no hierarchy at Lok Darshan in full recognition that though one person may possess technical skills and initially teach others, they are of no value without, say, the insider’s perspective on the slum that allows the programming to effectively reach the community. Everyone has a different skill-set and needs everyone else to achieve our common mission of effecting positive change in the slum.

We began our pilot on February 1^st, 2007 and ran until May 14^th, 2007. In our short pilot, we managed to create four ~30-minute episodes, each with a health-based core. The first episode focused on sanitation, and profiled a trashcan project, and a toilet-building and toilet-usage initiative in the slum. The second episode’s health-core focused on tuberculosis, a rampant killer in the slums that still remains shrouded in secrecy, shame, and misunderstanding. The health focus of the third episode was alcohol and tobacco addiction, a problem that plagues over 40% of the adult males in the slum. The fourth episode addressed issues of family planning.

Since each episode is effectively created by youth from the slum community itself, the message resonates deeply with the people. Moreover, the show flow is crafted to successively engage each demographic in the slum and deliver the health-core message when their interest is at a peak. It all sounds quite intense, but the reality is that the audience is simply having blast while they’re watching the program.

Anecdotes

Every episode has a ‘funny news’ segment at the top of the show flow. It is designed for kids, who are usually the first few hundred people to gather at any screening of Lok Darshan. The first episode featured a funny news segment where a girl was distressed at the loss of her broken, two-year-old slippers. After the first screening, she found it impossible to go anywhere in the slum without children genuinely concerned about whether she had found those slippers. Months later, though the kids now realize it was a fake news segment, she still gets asked about her slippers by kids with big smiles on their faces

The second episode’s TB piece featured a song about the symptoms and treatment for the disease written to the tune of a popular slum wedding song. About a month after the first screening, I was entering the slum from the opposite corner from where our screenings had been held. Some kids saw me, and though I never appear on camera in Lok Darshan’s programs, started singing our TB song! To think that this song that carried vital information that could save people’s lives was being sung by children in the narrow lanes of the sprawling slum was astounding, and begged the unanswerable question about how deeply and widely the message had rippled. People unknown to me still approach me in the slum as ask for my help in getting their stubborn relatives to seek out the free TB treatment provided by the government.

The loss of a laptop due to the unstable electric supply in the slum has prevented the third and fourth episode from being screened, out of recognition that our equipment is inadequately protected and that we’re not rich enough to be able to afford to lose anything else. Yet each episode has only refined our skills at reaching the audience more deeply, and I can’t wait to see the community’s response to the third and fourth screenings.

Keeping It Going

There are scores of innovators across India and the rest of the world that have worked hard to technically solve all the problems that slum dwellers face, like lack of clean water, cheap and efficient fuel, low-cost power, microfinance, etc. Yet these innovators who come up with products and services to serve the underprivileged fail much more often that your average startup. The reason is that they lack an effective marketing mechanism to reach their target population. There is no ‘slum newspaper’ or ‘slum tv’ or any other media outlet that allows them to avoid the time-consuming and laborious process of both making their potential customers aware of their products, and educating them on the need and benefit of using them. This failure of the market prevents the slow, incremental process of ‘poor’ people lifting themselves out of extreme poverty by keeping them away from products and services that have tremendous transformative potential in their lives.

The initial idea was to keep Lok Darshan going by getting these innovators to advertise their products and services on our program. I traveled around India and met a handful of these individuals, only to discover that none of them have very much money. Moreover, if they had the funds to advertise on a humble program like Lok Darshan, they lacked the ability to distribute outside their states into Gujarat where our target population is based.

The lack of an effective marketing mechanism for appropriate technology means that there are no banks willing to give these people a loan, and few investors or entrepreneurs interested in backing their potentially revolutionary products. A new approach was needed.

An easy route would have been to ask the countless funding organizations and potential donors for assistance. We have not done this because we firmly believe that this is something that need not be supported by charity. Lok Darshan is creating tremendous value for the slum community, and thus has the potential to support itself by advertising products that can change people’s lives for the better and thus amplify the good that it does as a medium.

Our new plan makes sense on paper, but it remains to be seen if it actually works out in reality. The idea is now to set up an appropriate technology demo center at Gandhi Ashram where the products and services with the highest potential to incrementally improve people’s lives can be stocked and distributed. The corporate donor that invests the modest sum needed to set up the center not only establishes a permanent site of goodwill in the slum community, but also gets their branding impression both narrowcast and broadcast through a key agreement with SITI cable, Ahmedabad’s cable distributor. Lacking good content, SITI is eager to broadcast Lok Darshan on their ‘VCR channel’ a self-produced and self-distributed local channel that reaches 1.2 million households. SITI usually charges about Rs. 42,000 for a 30-second advertisement (a sum just under what Lok Darshan costs in a month!), so if Lok Darshan embeds a 3-minute infomercial in our weekly content aired on SITI that features the donors brand (by virtue of it being in the demo center’s name), that exposure is worth >Rs. 500,000 a month. Hopefully, this means that the donor is willing to support Lok Darshan at a level that is 10% of that amount.

The good news is that National Innovation Foundation, a central government organization aimed at identifying and assisting grassroots innovators in bringing their products to market, is interested in partnering on the appropriate technology demo center. The scope of how they would like to partner is still being worked out.

My own interest would be to ‘CharityFocus’ Lok Darshan i.e. make it fully volunteer run, move forward without asking for anything, and to dis-intermediate the work into small enough segments such that many more people of much wider ability levels can get involved at their own leisure. The obstacles, in my opinion, are several. First, relief from poverty is imperative in the slums, and thus its difficult and probably inappropriate for slum dwellers to volunteer full-time. Moreover, I believe that employing people in the slum is itself a service, especially when you employ them in a manner that helps their own communities. Second, much like soup-making, video work is spoiled if there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Conceptualizing, shooting & interviewing, scripting, editing, and post-production need to be done with a single focus by a small number of people, or the results are apparent in the form of a disjointed and poorly-delivered story. What adds to this is that there are almost no people in the slum who own a video camera or know how to create and edit a story. Everyone must be taught from scratch in a process that takes at least two months, and use shared equipment owned by the few who can afford it. Lastly, even if we achieve the mark of being fully volunteer run, our equipment does not last very long in the harsh conditions we work in (as was apparent by the loss of our first laptop). Even in the absence of catastrophic failure or damage, this environment will destroy the equipment in two years or less, and this means that depreciation alone costs Rs. 17,500 a month. Ideas for overcoming these obstacles are welcome

In the absence of a donor who sets up an appropriate technology center, the next option would be to get corporations to sponsor one or several episodes, preferably with a ground-level initiative to match their program support. An example would be to have one of the local pharmaceutical companies sponsor an episode on malaria while simultaneously donating malaria medication and mosquito nets that can be distributed in the slum. If something like this didn’t work, I personally would prefer to allow Lok Darshan to disappear, but because it seems as though it has the potential to save lives, I would probably approach a funding organization.

Lok Darshan Supporters

Manav Sadhna is a continual source of inspiration and soft support, always engaged in work that is worth highlighting to the slum community. Jayeshbhai Patel, a rare hero of towering, yet humble proportions, has helped in ways too numerous to list. Jessica Mayberry and Stalin K. have shared much knowledge that has made the initial steps with Lok Darshan easier. Babubhai K. Patel has been a critical supporter of Lok Darshan, allowing us to use his Ranip home as our studio and office space. Mark B. Jacobs and Yoo-mi Lee donated an older laptop that we do all of our subtitling on, as well as allowing us to borrow Handycam when the firewire port on our deck camera malfunctioned. Pallavi Naidu also donated her old laptop. Dipti Vaghela connected us to Domes International, run by her uncle Harsinh Vaghela. Haru Uncle donated fiberglass a dome home to a struggling slum family in an experimental initiative that we hope we hope helps the slum community as much as it helps his business. Shagun Rastogi, a promising young filmmaker and recent NID graduate, managed to work on Lok Darshan as part of her diploma project in the creation of four powerful public service announcements. Jesal Parekh helped with our ‘business plan’ with rare insight scarcely found in youth his age. Anand Sirwani deserves special mention as a committed and intensely passionate volunteer who often would show up at the office before work, come into the office after work, and spend all weekend in the hot sun to make his creative and entertaining contributions to our work. Lastly, countless volunteers in the slum who value Lok Darshan and rush to attend our smallest needs whenever we are in the community must be praised for their love and devotion.

Getting Involved

The best way to support Lok Darshan is to get involved! If you are in Ahmedabad and already have video production skills, we would love to work with you when we start up again in November. We also need actors, singers, musicians, writers, directors, and crowd controllers.

People who have evenings free can be part of our projection crew, and get the exhilarating experience of seeing the community respond to the content. We can always find a use for old laptops, mini-DV video cameras, surge suppressors, UPS’, LCD projectors, and portable audio systems. If you know of a product or service that should be highlighted on Lok Darshan for its capacity to help urban or rural poor, let us know about it. Having a web presence would be nice, and will also allow more writers to volunteer. Know someone in an organization that would want to sponsor an episode? Put them in touch! Ideas on how to make Lok Darshan more sustainable? Let’s talk!

A journalist friend called last week to tell me that she found a man in bad condition living on the pavement. She tried to get him to some place where he would be out of the rain, but he didn’t budge so she called me for help. Would I be willing to be of service?

My life sometimes seems like a never-ending ‘to-do’ list, often reducing time management decisions to what I let slide rather than what I actually work on. Though I presumed this trip to India would be more conducive to focusing one thing at a time, my familiar American habit of attention fragmentation works surprisingly the same on this side of the world, reducing progress on any given project to a snail’s pace. Delegation has been a savior, but an underlying thirst for greater forward movement is a dangerous catalyst that can crystallize missions into ambitions.

Missions are based on values and have definite objectives. To the extent that your mission is planted in universal values like compassion and love, work towards reaching your objectives gently dissolves your ego.

Ambition is based on enjoyment and has vague or shifting objectives at best. Though often guised in grand overtures or clever hype, ambition is really just about yourself. To the extent that you ride your ambition, you increasingly cloud your mind in self-deception as your ballooning ego chokes out reality.

In the end, all the things that I am working on are aimed at trying to be of service. Its unjustifiable to ignore the service needed right in front of my face in favor of service to some distant, vague third-party in the future. Though it may seem irresponsible to rationalists, I dropped everything I was doing to go see this man and spend a few hours with him on the side of the road.

I only wish I always had the clarity to be rooted in my mission instead of my ambition.

As a few people pointed out, there are innumerable people in need of help. This has some truth in it, but all of those people didn’t cross my path. One man’s paradise is another man’s hell, so its also dangerous to assume that people need or want help, and one has to be careful to not color a situation with one’s own misery-tinted glasses. In this particular case, the waterlogged and ill man didn’t want to move one inch despite my best efforts to convince him that he would be better off elsewhere.

This business of helping is a dangerous one. Caution and grace are required to assist in a way that doesn’t damage other’s self-respect and self-reliance, nor caters to laziness. In extreme cases, there are all sorts of other psychological factors that complicate the situation. The man on the street was extremely depressed, making it tough for him to want to accept anything that would improve his condition. Even my attempts at making him laugh.

Still, wouldn’t my other work have been tainted with insincerity and self-deception if I allowed deadlines to get in the way of a helping hand?

There’s an fun little experiment that I’ve been lucky enough to help out with. Its called the Five Bucks Club, wherein a group of friends pool $5/ea to be used in India by Jayeshbhai Patel in micro-philanthropy. Check out the premise and the online diary to read some touching stories that are part of Jayeshbhai’s every day life. Or watch him walk through Gujarat’s largest slum.

While feeding the dogs that live on the stairs of my building some milk biscuits, I suddenly notice how healthy and energetic the littlest dog seemed to appear. Two weeks ago, most of his body was covered in mange and to call him sickly would be an understatement. I almost suspected that one day I would come home to find a canine corpse on my climb to the third floor.

Two weeks ago, I was in the thicket of caring for an old man I found dying in the gutter near the railway station. Though I hope to write more on the lessons I learned from this man at another time, today my tale is about one realization in particular. On my second day in the lung diseases ward of the Civil Hospital, it struck me rather powerfully that there was no difference between the man I found and anyone else there. Other patients were equally worthy of compassion as was the under-appreciated staff that, for the most parts, heaps neglect and sometimes abuse on the patients. In fact, I distinctly remember the feeling of not knowing who in particular should receive my attention as I was feeling compassion for them all. This feeling sustained throughout the day, such that I couldn’t help but feel for the dogs that were slumbering on the steps when I returned home late that night. I resolved that I must do something.

On the night of his departure back to the U.S., Virenbhai gave Dharmesh all the packaged American food that was left over in his refrigerator. Not having eaten a proper meal in several days, I only discovered Virenbhai’s gift a few days later on the morning after my compassion realization at the hospital. I cooked up what looked like breaded eggplant, only to discover that it was breaded cheese unfit for my lactose-intolerant stomach. Still, I greedily ate the tasty bread-coating and left the cheese aside, momentarily stumped about what to do with it. Then I remembered the dogs.

Surprisingly, only the smallest dog wanted to eat the cheese. Watching him eat it was a lot of fun, and he instantly became my friend. Over the next few days, he would follow me around enthusiastically and it only took me a couple of lessons to teach him to sit, stay, and come when called. He got more cheese and food over the next few days, but I was not consistent about feeding him by any means. Though I would joke to the people in our building that he was my chela (disciple), I actually got very busy again and began leaving home before he had awaken in the morning and returning long after he had gone to sleep at night. Until today.

As I was enjoying the sight of him and the other dogs finish the biscuits I was feeding them, I suddenly realized that his mange was gone. He looked like a healthy, albeit tiny, normal dog. And then I felt an itch on my bicep. And another on my forearm. Over the last few days, splotchy marks have appeared over right upper arm, my left arm, my stomach, and even one on my face. Lately, I’ve also felt a lot of idiopathic fatigue, coupled with a fair bit of weight loss. There’s reason to believe that I have intestinal worms, and armchair physician that I am, I made a self-diagnosis of ringworm (a fungal infection of the skin that is not actually a worm) in addition to my likely case of intestinal worms.

Right there on the stairs, I started laughing. Several years ago, I told my friend Shruti of some transportation mishaps I had experienced, including the effects of a long-standing curse from the ‘tire gods’. I had been plagued with a seemingly impossible series of parking tickets, speeding tickets, flat tires, nearly missed flights, and assorted bicycle near-misses that would be scary if they weren’t so funny. Shruti listened with such compassion that I almost felt relieved of my bad transportation karma, only to later discover that my transportation woes had in fact actually ended. This would be a wonderful thing, except that Shruti herself then experienced an abrupt onset of an impossible chain of vehicular incidents. In two years, the list is something like 3 stolen cars, 6 accidents, dozens of parking tickets, and almost daily near-misses. We joked about how she had been so compassionate in listening to my transport issues that she traded transportation karma with me, and was now working out my bad karma. It was a joke, but I think we both secretly believed that there was a sliver of truth in it.

Which is why I was laughing on the stairs. The thought that I was working out doggy karma absorbed in a moment of excessive compassion was hilarious. I headed off to the local pharmacy and bought de-worming tablets and anti-fungal cream, still smiling at both the dog’s transformation and my degeneration. For a moment, I was doing some metaphysical math in trying to connect the ripples: Shruti’s compassion freeing me of many burdens such that I could in turn free others of burdens, culminating into a moment where apparently a dog was the last known benefactor. It all made me wonder for a moment about whether it is worthwhile to be compassionate towards a dog if that meant that one might sacrifice something else of value (like one’s own health) or not have that time available to help humans. And then I thought of something Jayeshbhai often says: “Its all God helping God.”

C-O-UGH

Mine was almost instantly echoed in the cough of a ragpicker woman outside my taxi window. She and her picking partner were crossing the road and stopped on the median to await the opportune moment to scurry across the busy Bombay road. The fact that our coughs were nearly synchronous seemed not the least bit coincidental to me, but indicative of the extent to which we had melded into sameness.

In the next moment, the last few weeks flashed back to me, although flashback doesn’t accurately describe the experience. There was no timing or sequence or separation in the memories from that moment, such that even the word ‘memory’ was rendered inaccurate. It was as though all that had happened in the last few weeks, my first few weeks in India, was still happening… simultaneously. Each discrete element overlapped with every other element, occupying no additional space or time, nor existing separately from what was unfolding in front of my eyes. Past and present were completely blended, both existing equally at once– the echo indistinguishable from its instance. Or maybe it was just sleep deprivation.

Since I knew that I would have other commitments to tend to as my time in India progressed, my first few weeks were heavily steeped in the ragpicker experience. Living, dreaming, breathing in the world that is theirs to figure out how to bring in more light. Conversations with recyclable product makers, visits to municipal dumpsites, interviews with dump scavengers, scheme-dodging with trash kingpins, dreaming with waste engineers, visioning trash separation programs, chatting with garbage collectors, educating hesitant neighbors, connecting to roadside sorters, all were present in that blended moment. Through the course of the last two weeks, I had been so deeply involved in this world that I felt as though I myself was a ragpicker, though one finding trash and treasure alike on neglected roads that only a few had seemed to walk down. When I first arrived in Bombay a day prior, I felt a bit out of place—until I saw the ragpickers and reflexively thought, “There’s my people, the ones I can relate to.” I felt instantly at home.

So why shouldn’t we cough at the same time? What they felt, I felt. Their problems were my problems. In fact, no ‘they’s and ‘I’s, ‘their’s or ‘mine’ existed, just ‘we’ and ‘ours’. Sure, my cough was precipitated by the diesel truck belching soot into my left window, and hers was something else, but I was grateful for, and marveling at the harmony despite the many outward differences in our conditions.

Things were powerfully at flow.

CRH-H-H-H-H-C-R–C-H

The crackling sound of her blowing her nose.
A glob of thick, green phlegm began to buildup under her nostril, still dangling despite its incredible size. I understood immediately that her cough (and phlegm) originated from a severe respiratory infection. She kept blowing, and then grabbed the snot and flung it to the ground with a thrash of her wrist, wiping the snotty hand on her sari.

At the same time that I was feeling thoroughly disgusted by the sight of it all, a powerful impulse spontaneously arose that screamed that she and I were VERY different. Miles apart. Nothing alike. I wasn’t a ragpicker, nor did I want to have much to do with them if it meant having to deal with as much green phlegm as I had just seen. I felt so strongly repulsed that impatience for movement away from her and her infection instantly arose. With that impatience came an agitation that completely shifted my internal energy dynamics. Suddenly conscious of being tired and hungry, a self-serving chatter that usually forms some component of the background static of my mental noise began to re-assert itself.

The flow had been violently interrupted. Like a spoon under the kitchen tap when its turned all the way up, diffracting what once was a beautiful, singular stream into a chaotic, splattering, messy affair.

Trying to ignore what just happened, I continued on my way to a meeting with Jyoti of Stree Mukti Sanghatana (SMS), an NGO that has worked with ragpickers for over 30 years, to learn about the work they’ve done to empower these women. Not a fan of reinventing the wheel, I’m never hesitant to stand on the shoulders of giants and copy shamelessly from something that works. Archana S., whom I hadn’t seen for about a year, was also interested in learning about the NGO and met up with me outside their office. Archana wrote a bit about what we did on her blog, but what remained hidden was that I was quickly becoming very tired, distracted, and somewhat irritated. We went from site to site and spoke to person after person with my inner state continuing to decline. By the end of a few hours, I was thoroughly exhausted, had a headache, and wanted to go home, though I was doing a masterful job of keeping up appearances. It was the first time Archana had hung out with me in the context of ‘service’ and I didn’t want to convey the wrong attitude, or reinforce a resistance to serving in filthy environs that I was observing in her. I also didn’t want to seem ungrateful to the woman who had so graciously escorted us from location to location and waited patiently as I took my sweet time gleaning information. Instead, I suggested that we meet up with a friend and all go out to lunch.

Though significantly worn by this point, I reached down deep to project positive energy. Archana was visibly drained and our hostess also seemed tired. I wondered how much of it had been my own state subtly dragging them down. I thought of Nipun at Jayal’s wedding and how he continued to give out energy despite his condition, and reasoned that if I had any role in bringing these two down, I should give it my all to raise them back up the way Nipun would. Throwing down whatever I had, the energy state of the group slowly took a turn for the better (though the food and water probably had something to do with it). Still, by the time I reached home, I crashed. I must have slept 15 of the next 18 hours, still tired and nearly missing my bus to Pune the next morning (for yet another meeting with another NGO). The full day in Pune and the three hour plus bus ride back to Bombay didn’t do much to make me less tired, so I was looking forward to stretching out on my berth that night on the train ride back to Ahmedabad.

I awoke the next morning in A’bad with a sore throat. That evening, Arzoo was putting on a performance produced by former Indicorps fellow Shivana Naidoo. I had signed up to be the videographer for the event and arrived at the venue a bit early to set up. My sore throat was quickly ripening into something worse, but I was still completely functional. Halfway through the event, a high fever hit so I handed off the camera and passed out in the theater.

In hindsight, it’s so clear that the illness began the moment I resisted the flow. The moment I placed that internal wall of separation between myself and the sick ragpicking woman, I blocked something powerful. And blocking something powerful is bound to have serious consequences. How often do we all do that in little ways? Perhaps the big problems, or even all the problems, we see in the world are just the summation of lots of people doing something small to disrupt an energy that could have flowed beautifully had they not set up walls between themselves and the people around them.

In my evening meditation the next night, I realized what I had done to make myself sick and worked to try and undo it. The next morning I felt better. The night after that, I felt well enough to tolerate the A/C of a movie theater, though an earthquake struck and prevented me from fully testing my tolerance (or seeing the end of the movie). Ten days later in Delhi and then Amritsar, I was outwardly asymptomatic. Now, one month later, the last inner residue of resisting the powerful flow from that day in Mumbai has finally worked its way out of my system.

Such a long journey. Such a heavy price to pay to exclude a fellow human. I pray that my days find me in flow and flowing with inclusion.