Green Buddhist School in Ladakh

More from BuddhistArtNews.com, my new favorite source, news of an award winning ultra-green school in Ladakh, which is quite a poor corner of India that borders China and is the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir. I visited there in 2004 for a week after a business trip to India. During one of my day trips from Leh, I crossed the 3rd highest pass in the world - serious altitude. There was an Indian Army post there and the soldiers from very warm Punjab were so delighted to see anyone that they invited us in for tea. But I digress...

Here's the cool school:

Barely 15 km southeast of Leh, the hilly headquarters of Ladakh district in Jammu and Kashmir, lies one of India’s most innovative “green” schools that operates on solar power and draws on natural elements to provide “sustainable education” to poor children.

The earthquake-resistant Druk White Lotus School, made of local sandstone, poplar and willow wood, steel, glass and solar panels, straddles a sandy stretch of cold desert in Shey village, flanked by barren mountains.

The school, a seat of education that blends the traditional Ladakhi culture, Buddhist philosophy and modern learning modules, is the winner of three World Architecture Awards - for the best “Asian Building”, the best “Green Building” and the best “Education Building”.

Communication Revolution

I've heard stories that Indian village farmers can now make more money because, via cellphone, they have better market information. I also remember my friend using his cellphone screen as a flashlight to help us all go down the dark stairs in his apartment building.

Sometimes a technology comes along and crystallizes a cultural moment. Not since Americans and their automobiles in the 1950s, perhaps, have a people and a technology wedded as happily as Indians and their cellphones — small and big, vibrating and tringing, BlackBerry and plain vanilla.

What makes the cellphone special in India? It is partly that India skipped the land-line revolution, making cellphones the first real contact with the outside world for hundreds of millions of people. It is partly that, with few other machines selling so briskly, the cellphone in India is forced variously to be a personal computer, flashlight, camera, stereo, video-game console and day organizer as well. It is partly that India’s relative poverty compels providers to be more creative to survive.

But it is also that the cellphone appeals deeply to the Indian psychology, to the spreading desire for personal space and voice, not in defiance of the family and tribe, but in the chaotic midst of it. [NY Times]

Gandhi - the missing Peace Prize winner?

I came across an interesting article yesterday on the Nobel Prize website. Mahatma Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize. Why not? The lists of nominees and records of decision-making are sealed for 50 years and so the discussions of Gandhi's last nomination in 1948 have only recently come to light.

It seems that the committee had a tradition of selecting winners who were European or American and affiliated with some kind of peace-focused organization. They were also concerned about the very bloody outcome of the partition of India with the slaughter and relocation of millions along religious lines...

Up to 1960, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded almost exclusively to Europeans and Americans. In retrospect, the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee may seem too narrow. Gandhi was very different from earlier Laureates. He was no real politician or proponent of international law, not primarily a humanitarian relief worker and not an organiser of international peace congresses. He would have belonged to a new breed of Laureates.

There is no hint in the archives that the Norwegian Nobel Committee ever took into consideration the possibility of an adverse British reaction to an award to Gandhi. Thus it seems that the hypothesis that the Committee's omission of Gandhi was due to its members' not wanting to provoke British authorities, may be rejected.

In 1947 the conflict between India and Pakistan and Gandhi's prayer-meeting statement, which made people wonder whether he was about to abandon his consistent pacifism, seem to have been the primary reasons why he was not selected by the committee's majority. Unlike the situation today, there was no tradition for the Norwegian Nobel Committee to try to use the Peace Prize as a stimulus for peaceful settlement of regional conflicts.

During the last months of his life, Gandhi worked hard to end the violence between Hindus and Muslims which followed the partition of India. We know little about the Norwegian Nobel Committee's discussions on Gandhi's candidature in 1948 – other than the above quoted entry of November 18 in Gunnar Jahn's diary – but it seems clear that they seriously considered a posthumous award. When the committee, for formal reasons, ended up not making such an award, they decided to reserve the prize, and then, one year later, not to spend the prize money for 1948 at all. What many thought should have been Mahatma Gandhi's place on the list of Laureates was silently but respectfully left open.

China vs. India

Here's an interesting excerpt a review in Foreign Policy of the book, Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, written by the first Chinese-speaking Indian journalist in Beijing:

Whether it’s the breathless pace of China’s economy versus India’s slower, more measured growth, or China’s communist political system rated against India’s complicated democracy, the two countries are endlessly dissected in relation to one another. Yet amid all the hand-wringing over which country is “beating” the other in their race to industrialize, one simple question sums up very pointedly the debate over which one is making life better for its citizens. It’s a question few dare to ask in polite circles: If you were born today, would you rather be Chinese or Indian?

Delhi-born Pallavi Aiyar, the first Chinese-speaking Indian journalist based in Beijing and author of an engaging new book about the two countries, takes on the charged question. The best option, she contends, is to be a high-caste Indian man. His political freedom would certainly outweigh the economic opportunities of any Chinese citizen, she argues. But if that weren’t possible, she’d choose to be a wealthy Chinese woman, because she wouldn’t be as constrained as her Indian counterparts by low literacy rates and limits on female participation in the public sphere. If she had to be poor, she’d go with China. An Indian latrine cleaner may get to vote, she says, but a Chinese one is far less likely to be viewed as completely subhuman.

Slumdog - go see it

We saw Slumdog Millionaire last night. Wow! What a movie!
It is not for the faint of heart - there are some pretty brutal scenes about the main character's childhood, growing up an orphan, living on his wits in the slums of Bombay/Mumbai. Jamil goes on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and because he does do well he's accused of cheating. After all, how could a tea boy from the slums know anything?

I've been to India twice, but this certainly was not the India that I experienced being whisked from one fancy hotel to another by a private driver.

Olympics - Where is India?

I was looking at this very nifty graphic on the NY Times site, which shows medal counts for all of the modern Olympic Games, and I thought to myself: Where's India??

It is so often compared to it's equally enormous neighbor to the north, China, which won 100 medals. I realized India was essentially missing, not just in this Olympics, but in past ones as well. India won 3 medals, half the number of Uzbekistan, and far, far fewer than Belarus, for example.

Why does India have so few? Tell me your thoughts, I'd love to hear.

Darjeeling - the place

I was talking (well, IMing) with a friend of mine tonight whose family is in the tea biz in India. He sent me these awesome pictures of the area around Darjeeling. I think I want to go.

And a vintage label of some tea that's produced there.

Hyderabad & a Story With/Without a Moral

In the New York Times travel section this week was a short article on the rise in both tourist and business travel to Hyderabad, India. It reminded me of my first night in India, on a business trip in the summer of 2004, when I almost started a sectarian riot.

I was travelling with a colleague, Amar, a Hyderabad native, and Hyderabad was our first port of call. We had traveled 24 hours from Chicago to Frankfurt to Bombay to Hyderabad. It was exhausting. So, after sleeping most of the day, Amar called me and asked me to go out on the town with him. I was picked up in a Range Rover driven by Amar's real estate developer brother-in-law, his movie-star friend (married), his girlfriend and Amar.

As we walked into the newest dance club in town, by-passing the line, the actor was stopped for autographs and we tried to keep to the shadows to avoid the paparazzi, since his girlfriend was with us. After a long night drinking pricey drinks and dancing, we left the club and my hosts decided I needed a late night tour of the sights of Hyderabad. So, off we drove, drinking Chivas Regal out of the bottle, roof open, weaving around the old women stooped over sweeping the streets. At one point, we made a phone call to a Congress MP who was the friend of the brother-in-law. He and I drunkenly chatted about something or other.

They took me to Charminar, the 400-year old gate in the middle of the poor, mostly Muslim part of town where people were lined up sleeping on the sidewalk. Keep in mind my crowd of rich, drunk Hindus in a Range Rover with an immodestly-clad blonde in the back seat.

There's a small mosque at the Charminar, so Amar and I climbed out to go see it. I was wearing a short skirt, so I wasn't allowed in, but the mosque custodian smiled at me and gave me a small green flag with a white star and crescent. I was happy and climbed back in the car to show off my souvenir. All the guys in the car flipped out and thought is was a Pakistani flag, which it was not. So they climbed back out of the car, woke up a cop and started yelling about being real Indians, etc. People on the sidewalks started waking up. I started yelling "I'm Christian, I'm Christian" and herding my crowd back into the car. By the time we left half the square was awake and starting to move towards the car. And that was how I almost started a riot on my first night in India.

Is there a moral to this story? Is it:

1. Don't drink and drive.
2. Don't go to mosques in short skirts.
3. Understand the history including animosities of the places you're visiting.
4. Don't go out with your girlfriend when there are paparazzi around.
5. Drinking Chivas Regal makes you immune to political violence.
   

Vote, or suggest your own.