I finally decided to go down and get some henna (mehndi). Actually, I just didn't know of a good place to get it, but after asking one of the girls at Zoom I was recommended to a stall that is fairly close and for a couple of dollars I got designs on both hands.
I love having designs all over my hands.
Both arms at once, twice as fast.
They rubbed my arm with perfume and then started doodling.
We also got to be filmed for Zoom's Youtube channel. It was just a simple interview, but the way Mr Noble talked about it, you would think that we were the world's greatest actors. He even said that we could be picked up for a Bollywood video. Although with the video quality (mostly the sound of our voices being eaten up by the sound of a machine and some of the funky camera angles) I doubt that would ever happen.
This glass sign came out of no where to make a cameo in our film.
Subtle, eh?
Here I am.. adjusting the.. cable on the.. you know
Yes, just flip this switch and... run, works every time.
In India you are confronted daily with the face of hunger. I have seen homeless people before in larger US cities, cities are gathering places for hopes, dreams, and futures-- those realized and those that have failed. I know that the face of homelessness is not always what you would expect, it's not just the children in the streets with long faces and cruelly ironic kwashiorkor bellies-- swollen not with food but malnutrition. It's not just the face on the corner with the bench-made-bed and the cardboard sign. It's not even just the pleading smiles on the bowed faces as they approach you in the middle of traffic, making motions towards their mouths, a sign so universally touching that it is almost impossible to keep your heart from being ripped from your chest. It is something that seems to never be solved by just another meal or another dollar bill, but what if you can't give anything
more than that?
Daniel has a saying every time he sees a tradition that he doesn't really agree with, which is "I don't want to support bad behavior." This is typically his feeling about panhandling, since there are government and other charitable institutions in the US that are purposefully for helping people who are low on food and funds. Most of the time if you give money to people on the street it propagates the activity of waiting for people to give you money on the street, instead of using other resources that are in place. That being said, I also feel like you ought to help those around you. We do give money to homeless people if we feel like it and we try to always smile and sometimes have conversations with people, when time allows. Generally we try and get food for people, but it's not always possible.
In general though, I don't really know what to think about poverty. It seems like a problem, if you don't have money to eat you don't have money for other things, like health care and good housing and education. If you have a society of starving people then how can you have a prosperous economy? But you also can't solve a problem with just money or pity. Also, I can't personally solve my own country's poverty issues, let alone do it for another country. I feel like in order to solve problems you need to be able to fully understand them, their causes, their faces and how they are manifest, and possible solutions. How could I possibly do all that?
It's hard to know just where I stand on the issue in India though. I suppose I have a few biases. One is that I know that a lot of the beggars I see on the street don't actually get to keep their money, but have handlers and I definitely don't want to encourage that behavior. Another bias is that I know I am targeted for being white. I know it sounds callous since I am American and am used to spending more money than them, but I hate people assuming that I have money to give to them, just because of the color of my skin. But I also don't know much about the Indian government programs or structure and so I don't honestly know if these people have places to turn. I have seen plenty of various religious places that offer food for the poor and I know that they don't live where they beg, because there aren't any around in early mornings when I first get up. Maybe they have homes, maybe they don't, I have no idea, but it's a different type of homelessness and poverty than in the US.
Although I don't always know the best way to feed it and I don't think it can be solved by money alone, I have never regretted being too generous. How do you deal with poverty?
I originally had wanted to go to the Hyderabad zoo because one of my goals for India was to ride an elephant. Since we weren't going to be going to any other cities, I did a quick Google search to see what chances I would have of riding an elephant here and was directed to the website where it clearly states that elephant rides are available. After walking around the Nehru Zoological Park viewing almost all 380 acres of animal sanctuary, I realized that these elephant rides must either be hidden really well or not exist at all. We tried to ask at least 3 different park workers and they had a hard time understanding what we were asking, one redirected us to the safari, but said that they only have lions, tigers, and bears, no elephants. Another worker emphatically pointed me to the exit and so I kept repeating "elephant, EL-E-FA-N-T" and then he would look confused and try to push me towards the exit. Forcing your patrons to leave instead of answering their questions-- I guess that's one technique to deal with customers.
We did enjoy looking at the animals, although there are no pictures of them, only an hour's worth of footage where Daniel tried to capture them on film and mostly got low quality images of bushes/animals and lots of our puny dialogue about the animals and a lot of screaming school children in the background. We did have quite a few teenage boys come up and ask to take their pictures with us, apparently we were just as novel as the animals in the cages. Except we were a bit more interactive.
What a fun tree.
We love the zoo!
Hanging out by the trees with weird lighting.
That's not water on my shirt, just shadows.
Daniel loves bears. His new favorite animal.
Except, he has always liked bears.
Turns out we were a bigger attraction than the animals.
Yeah, this happened a lot.
My dream come true, someone came up and just
handed me their child. They took him back though.
Good placement for one of these.
It's a trap. It looks neat, but it's just dark and smelly.
This is one of the many palaces of the nizams, who were the regional leaders of the area (area= anywhere from half of India to finally just the state of Andra Pradesh over the course of a few hundred years). The man who took us here used to be the director of the place for about 6 years and was really informative about the restoration process of just about everything. He had a pretty tight relationship with the family of nizams that was left and so told us some fun stories. He also had access to everything, so we got to go behind any roped off areas and into this super secluded guest house area where they still let high officials and visitors stay when they come into town.
View from one of the courtyards
Just a decorative cannon. Only would have been useful
if there had been an attack on their pond.
I love these flowers.
Hall where the nizam would sit when there were formal gatherings.
Adam explaining about how he found all these
weapons in a well he excavated.
SWORDS!!!
Riding around in style was important.
Hanging out in another courtyard.
I really like these trees, but the sun was so bright.
Books from a secret library.
Daniel would make a great nizam.
We were meant for royalty.
If I knew Arabic or Hindi, this library would have been even more awesome.
Charminar
To find out what this is, we'll break it down a little bit.
charm= the power or quality of delighting, attracting, or fascinating others
inar= a Hittite god of woods and fields.
That doesn't sound quite right, maybe we should use Urdu. Ah yes, here it is:
Char= 4
Minar= Towers
So it's the 4 towers, which is twice as good as the two towers. If you thought Daniel had a thing for the two towers, you should have seen his joy when we got to see FOUR towers. As Adam (our guide/friend) explained it, there are other places similar to the charminar in other places of India, but this is one of the most extravagant. In ancient times (or pre-widely used compass times) when a traveller came into a city they could use the charminar as a guide post, as each arch points to one of the cardinal directions (North, South, etc, not like the ones dressed in red with funny hats). In addition, they could use the shelter provided from the charminar to rest before they began their journey again.
Since it is also near the palace and the main part of the city, it is surrounded by tourists and merchants. You can buy anything your heart desires (as long as your heart desires fruit, jewelry, or imported goods from China). However, if you want to park, you will have to either be on a motorcycle or find a spot half a mile away, since neither of those conditions fit us, we admired the building from our air conditioned car.
It's a pretty big deal.
Want a backpack? How about a pile of clothes?
The Charminar!
Some paan that we had after a meal of Hyderabadi Biryani.
Golconda Fort
Built originally of mud in the 13th century, Golconda Fort is an impressively large structure with amazing acoustics. If you go on a Sunday afternoon (like us) then you may be just as impressed by the mass amount of tourist as you are by the mass amounts of rock. Although there are signs up to encourage you to respect the ruins, you can find many children (or childish adults) running around on top of structures, around barricades, and hanging from various heights to impress their friends. It's a nice little hike to the top of the fort and a pleasant view and breeze to meet you when you reach it.
The doors had spikes on them to prevent against
elephant attacks, something you don't see in Europe.
I love the peaked arches.
Some of the outer walls.
The forts! (and some lawns, nice for a picnic)
A view of the fort and city.
Panorama of the fort and a lot of Hyderabad.
This kid followed us for like 20 minutes trying to
sell us cotton candy, eventually we just
gave him money and took his picture.
This is not meant to be a comprehensive guide, just a basic overview based on our limited experience.
Preparing for the event: What should I wear? The traditional Hindi wedding dress is bright red, so it is recommended that you wear anything else. You can still wear red, just make sure the majority of your dress isn't red. Although, from what I could gather after being at the wedding, no one is going to mistake you for the bride in any of the pictures unless you also happen to be wearing 50+ bracelets and 6 inches worth of flower garlands with cornmeal in your hair. As long as you avoid this style, you should be fine. Most people will be wearing business casual type of wear, for women this means a colorful sari and for men it is jeans and a button up shirt, possibly slacks and a button up shirt. Family members will be wearing more tradition clothes, but if you are family, you don't have to read this post to find out what to wear. What gift should I bring?
Some modern couples will create a gift registry of sorts, but you can never go wrong with a pretty envelope full of money. Make sure that it is an odd number, usually to help out with this if you buy a wedding envelope it will conveniently have a 1 rupee piece pasted onto the front. Not sure why, but this will bring luck. If you want to get something for the couple you can always bring some sort of gold statue of a god, kitchenware, or if you are really close, jewelry for the bride. There isn't really a "gift table" so once the ceremony is over you all gather on stage to meet the bride and groom and you have to give them the gift then. You will probably have 10 seconds (30 if you are lucky) so I would recommend just an envelope with money, it is also considered one of the most considerate gifts, bonus.
The Wedding Itself:
Traditional Hindu weddings are not a day long event, they contain days worth of ceremonies, including painting the bride with mehndi (also known as henna), home decorations, engagements with written proposals, groom parades, etc. As we were only friends, we were invited to one of the last rituals, it only last for 2 hours and then there was the food, mingling, and dancing. Side note: before a bride is married her female relations gather together to cover her in mehndi designs, hidden inside some of these intricate patterns, they hide the names of the bride and groom. Theoretically the groom isn't allowed to do anything on their wedding night until he can find the names.
Our invitation said that the wedding started at 9:45 am and when we arrived at 9:45 am, we were there with only 10 other people in a large auditorium with a stage and a large covering set up with 3 million flowers. After 15 minutes we heard a loud drum procession and looking out the window saw the groom being carried on the shoulders of his male family members up into the building.
Good thing these were hanging on the gates, gotta
make sure that we were at the right place.
Walk way outside that led up to the building.
Stage with flowers hanging down and the camera set up.
We watched as they awkwardly tried to get through doorways and up the steps to the stage and then the groom was sat in a chair facing the audience. The entire ceremony was in Telegu (I think, could have also been Sanskrit, Hindi, or Klingon) and so it was hard to understand what was happening. Thankfully, there was a camera crew with a camera crane to pan the audience and get our reactions as well as a crew on the stage itself and everything was broadcast on a screen off to the side. Thanks to this projection and the wonderful 1980s clipart that accompanied it, we were able to watch some of the various rituals.
This part went on for well over 2 hours and presided over by a Hindu priest speaking with the voice of a televangelist, so to detail exactly how it went would be difficult. To give you an insight into some of the highlights though:
The groom got to wear a white suit with turban and what appeared to be a pure diamond unibrow and face the audience while the bride had family members ceremoniously place more necklaces and bracelets then I thought physically possible.
After the bride was covered in jewels, one of the sets of parents came and washed the groom's feet and then painted them yellow and red.
Groom had lots of milk and sugar poured into his hand which he had to drink and then after about an hour he got to turn around and see his bride, but was still separated by a large sheet that some people held up.
The priest said some things and then the bride and groom played footsie (maybe toesie would be a better word, there was this weird round pillow that they had to put their foot on and then caressed each others toes with their own toes).
Lots of pouring water through each others hands and exchanging more flower garlands.
At one point they each had a tropical leaf with what looked like a beef patty in it and I thought maybe they were going to feed it to each other, but instead they smooshed it on each others heads. Then for about 15 minutes they poured cornmeal on each other, just throwing it on each other's heads. It looked like a lot of fun-- wedding food fight! When it was over and everyone came up to greet them what you did was take a hand full of cornmeal from a bowl and then sprinkle some on each of their heads and then move on. Why don't we do this in America?
There was no wedding ring exchanged, at least, not a finger ring. The groom did give the bride a toe ring at which point Daniel started singing "if you like it then you better put a toe ring on it"
At the end they got to sit in fancy king chairs while hundreds of people threw food at them and congratulated them.
The happy bejeweled couple.
Flowers seem so much nicer than car paint.
Indian weddings are typically quite large -- 500 to 1,000 people will attend for at least some part of the wedding. You can usually tell when the ceremonies are wrapping up and the food is about to start because the auditorium will suddenly start to fill up quickly. Once the ceremony is over all the men in the audience go up to meet the couple and then the women and once you have made it across the stage you can file out to the eating area. One great thing about Indian events is that there will always be food and lots of it. The plates when we went were 2-3 times larger than any other plate I have ever eaten off of and there was plenty of food to fill them with. Curries, sweets, fruits, rices, and flat breads filled us to bursting and then we started in on the ice cream/ kulfi.
There was also plenty of music and even if we could have understood the language of the wedding, I'm sure it would have all been drowned out by the constant beating of the drummers through out the entire thing. There was a band setting up as we started to eat and I believe they were about to begin dancing, but we were too full and tired to stay any longer. However, if you do ever find yourself at a Hindu wedding and you have any inclinations to dance, I would recommend learning a bit of bhangra. Daniel and I watched the video below a few times and had we not been so full of food were ready to show off our dance moves.
What is the most interesting wedding tradition you have seen/done? Is there any tradition that you just can't stand?
