Festival Week ... part two

Festival Times ... week two

This past Friday night, Rachel and I joined up with some of our adventurous ASB colleagues, Waciuma, Twyla, and Greg, to witness one of the most important religious events for Hindus here in Mumbai. -- Side note: although you may think Hindus in Mumbai would celebrate the same as Hindus elsewhere in India, it is actually NOT the case. Instead, each regional Hindu community has it's own particular important festival.

With apologies to all involved, I'll try to get these facts correct...

Here are the basics: Last Friday was the beginning of the Ganesha Festival and it began with a bang (see previous blog entry). On the fifth, seventh, tenth and twelfth days of the festivals, groups of Hindus -- either a housing co-op, an extended family, or a business -- bring their decorated Ganesha statue down to the beach and ceremoniously immerse it into the water. We visited our local beach, Juhu Beach, on the seventh day of the festival, which was an important day, but not nearly has popular as the last day of the festival. The last day of the festival, Sept 22, is so popular and the traffic is so bad that we have to have an early dismissal from school.

The Ganesha ceremony begins in the family home/apartment complex/business with prayers, offerings, and song. Then, the whole group of people gets moving and makes their way to the immersion site, the closest beach. Depending on the amount of effort being spent, this may include renting a mini-semi truck to carry the statue, around 30 people and a huge stereo system to blast on the way so that every one can hear you coming. If the family has a more modest income, they will just put the statue in the back of their car. Some of them we saw went traditional and had an ox and cart hauling their statue to the sea while others were fancier with three trucks: one to carry the generator, one to carry people and the sound and light system, and one to pull the Ganesha, which was carefully adorned with hundreds of flowers. Think Macy's Day Parade, but at night.

What is really great about the processions in my opinion is that once they get to the beach, the trucks and sound systems have to stay in the parking lot. This makes the beach a "relatively" calm atmosphere with pockets of people gathering around their Ganesha and singing Hindu prayer songs. As we watched and learned more by talking with Hindus who were very happy to share their traditions with us, we became more entranced by the rituals. A very elaborate cycle of singing accompanies the head of the house or priest as they burn oil and circle the statue many times. Food and sweets are offered up as the intensity of the music progresses. After the climax of the music, prayers are quietly whispered, followed by one last touch of the statue by each parishioner. After this, the men walk backwards into the sea (the festival is timed so that the tide is out during the evening) and slowly push the statue out to sea.

There are so many parts to this event that we have thoughts about, but here are a few salient points:

1) Since the recent modernization of India, the statues have been made of plaster of paris, which has caused enormous environmental damage. Local environmental NGOs estimate the this festival alone causes a SEVEN mile dead zone in the Arabian Sea.

2) Walking the beach is also very erie as the dismembered Ganesha body parts from earlier are washed up on the shore -- watch your step.

3) The symbolism behind the entire ceremony to observe the rebirth of Ganesha as he is sent back into the sand. After the ceremony, family members bring back handfulls of sand back to their houses with them.

As I re-read my entry, I feel inadequate. Our experience was extremely powerful and I hope that I have conveyed a bit of it.

Our entire experience can be summed up with one conversation with one local.

Local 14-yr old boy: "Do you have this back in America?"

Greg: "No, not at all."

Boy: "I'm going to go the U.S. and bring this to you Americans!"

In essence, people were happy to share and teach us about the ceremony which made it all the more special.

RW

Sept Festivals

September Festivals

This past weekend was an incredible time here in Mumbai as the three major religions celebrated with big festivals.

1) Eid: Muslims celebrating the end of Ramadan and breaking their final fast with fireworks, goat slaughtering, and huge parties. The big excitement is the food at sunset, but since most of it is street food, we didn't partake -- maybe next year when our tummies have adjusted better.

2) Ganesha: Hindus celebrating the beloved elephant God who is known as the remover of obstacles. Traditionally, each family orders and blesses their own Ganesha (ranging from 1-2 feet tall, to 15-20), eventually ending in a procession at the end of the week down to the ocean to have it submerged. This tradition has expanded greatly in the past few decades so that companies and housing associations have gotten in on the fun. Downtown, there are now contests for the tallest and most colorfully decorated Ganesha. Many have expanded to not just statues of the jolly God, but also telling some of the mythology behind him. Up in our suburb of Bandra, the impromptu Ganesha temples are small and quaint. The ones downtown look like they have been inspired by the Rose Parade.

3) Mary Festival: Catholics celebrating the birth of Mary while simultaneously remembering the miracle on Mount Mary (a hill here in our neighborhood), where someone had a body part cured by an appearance of Mary. If you have any part of your body ailing you, you can buy a small wax replica of it (there are countless stalls along the hill to the church) and leave it as an offering at the church so you will be healed. It is quite the experience to walk for a few blocks where everyone is selling wax arms, legs, spines, breasts, full bodies, and even things like your motorcycle or house (not sure how that fits into the miracle). On your way out of the church is another few blocks of stalls selling Indian sweets, cheap clothes and crafts, and there are even portable kiddie rides like a mini ferris wheel they have at the MN State Fair (though, I'm not even that comfortable with the ones in MN, let alone here in India).

It may be cliche to say, but it is worth pointing out a few items of note. One very interesting and exciting observation was that people from all faiths participate in and celebrate with each other. This point is particularly salient to us because of the controversy in the U.S. regarding the painfully intolerant pastor in Florida. By no means has Mumbai (or India for that matter) figured out what it means to be religiously tolerant, what we witnessed this weekend was a powerful image.

To close with a final story: on Friday evening we celebrated the end of our work at the apartment of one of our administrators. They have a nice balcony overlooking the neighborhood. At sundown we saw fireworks begin and go throughout the next couple hours, erupting from all different parts of the neighborhood. The best part was, you couldn't tell which festival was being celebrated -- all three were going on simultaneously. The icing on the religious cake came later as the cacophony of explosions were accompanied by a church choir.

So happy festivals to all!

Technology @ASB

One of the crazy parts about my life as a teacher at ASB is the technology. If you haven't checked out the school website, the main message that you are missing is that we try to lead the way in technology usage in the classroom by participating in a one-to-one laptop program (meaning every kid gr 6-12 gets a laptop).

There are a lot of great pedagogical things to do when every kid has a laptop, but it also creates a bit of a chaotic classroom. Since they all have PCs (note the Mac bias here), it takes the students anywhere from 1-3 minutes to power up and log in. Now this doesn't seem like a lot of time, but with a class of 40 it definitely is! And, since we use Windows, invariably someone cannot log in and has to restart, which puts them behind. Oh, and the battery power is real low so along with those 40 laptops in the classroom we have 40 power cords which need plug points (or plug ins for you American-English types). But I digress ...

... Laptops ... The coolest usage so far in my class for the laptops has been practice cards. All of the students can access our class OneNote (a Microsoft Office Suite product) documents and each student gets their own "tab," their own section of the document which only I and they can see/edit. So when they practice at home, they record directly onto the "tab" and when they return to school, the file is uploaded automatically (with a few glitches here and there) to the server so that I can listen to it. Yesterday afternoon, I listened to (almost) all of my students play their assigned piece and provided comments onto their OneNote tab. A wonderful formative assessment of their playing.

The high school students are learning about counterpoint and using it to understand intervalic relationships. Since they all have Sibelius on their laptops, we can use the notation software to get the two-part counterpoint pieces composed, but better yet, shared with other students. Next week in class, I will teach them how to transpose so that they can share with students who play other instruments.

These are just two examples of using technology in the band room at ASB. It's interesting, challenging and professionally stimulating to help students prepare for the 21st century.

Reid

Vignette

After getting some tea a few days ago I began walking to my before school playground duty. I got to the hallway where one entire wall is a map of the world. Standing there together were two of my more "tough guy" 5th grade boys. One was a new student to our school. They were pointing out the different places they had each lived (Sao Paolo, South Africa, Berlin, Oman, Hong Kong...), giving comparisons of what it was like to live there (maybe a favorite food, weather, memory, or sporting game they had there...) One of them started looking for Israel and was having a hard time finding it on the huge wall. They turned to me and asked me to help them find it. Once I pointed it out, they kept on with their stories of the world, including me in on their insights and experiences. For one of them, Mumbai is the 6th country he has lived in. The other one, his 4th.

It was fascinating to listen to them talk about such different places with such matter-of-factness. The ability to be in a new place and just accept things as "that's the way it is here" I think for most of us is not readily or easily accepted and understood.

These two boys have it. And they're 10 years old.

Rachel

Janmashtami/Human Pyramids

First Indian Festival!

Janmashtami- or as we westerners know it, the human pyramid festival.

Not to turn into a total teen, but, O... M.... G..... All I can say is, if my mother had been here she would have been a little nervous watching those little kids climb to the top! The long of the short of it is, teams from all around the city travel from spot to spot, trying to earn prize money (or just some glory). The goal is to reach a very high clay pot that is filled with gee (clarified butter) and honey, as well as marigolds and other special things, and the top person is to break the pot, spilling the contents on the team and surrounding people. The background is that is a celebration of Krishna, as a child, stole some of the honey and butter that was being exported away, none being left for the towns people. The moral is to not forget to partake in the sweet things in life.

It was a WONDERFUL first Indian festival experience for me. The teams were BEYOND excited to see us there, I took so many photos and had so many taken of me as well. The crowds were fun, polite, energetic, and eager to talk to us and make sure we were loving Mumbai. I have to admit I was a little concerned about the "grabbing" possibility, as I've been told that especially blonds tend to get either the front or back side grabbed by these rowdy groups of boys, but, not a single hand or pinching. Just amazingly fun exchanges between so many different groups of people. We saw 6 or so pyramids go up, and myself and two other girlfriends from ASB and I were invited to help in the girls pyramid we saw (totally amazing- the girl made it to the top, broke the pot and we were showered with the contents. No words to describe the exhilaration). The last, and largest group we saw, the boy cracked the pot, but then the men below him started to fall, and hung there, 4 stories high for about 30 seconds while they reestablished the pyramid to catch him. No one around us seemed worried at all, they just cheered him on louder, and of course, it was fine. Craziness.

I could go on forever, and I'm sure Reid will have a few of his own personal moments to share. The pictures really tell more...
Rachel