Rock climbing is a popular outdoor sport in certain parts of the world, but India doesn't happen to be one of them. Recently, the state of Maharashtra announced plans to begin promoting the sport to attract tourism to the area. This has inspired Indian born climber Sujay Kawale, who now lives in the U.S., to travel home and help introduce the sport to his native country. Sujay and his friend Mike Wilkinson are hoping to document those efforts while simultaneously showing off the climbing opportunities there in a new film called Ascending India. To do that, they've launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund their efforts. They're hoping to raise $10,000 for the project and with 14 days to go, they could certainly use some help getting to their goal.

To get an idea of what they have in mind, take a look at the trailer video for the film below. Good luck guys!

Ascending India Teaser Trailer from Mike Wilkinson on Vimeo.

The Mumbai Xpress is a 1900 km (1180 mile) race across India that takes place over 13 stages between  the cities of Mumbai and Chennai. The catch is, the race is run in tiny little rickshaw vehicles that don't seem built for such a long distance. Recently, two friends - Ric Gazarian and Keith King - competed in the race and have now released a travel documentary of their experience entitled Hit The Road: India. The movie is available on iTunes, Amazon Instant Video and various other digital distribution sources and follows Ric and Keith on this grand odyssey across India. Judging from the trailer below, it looks like it was quite the adventure.

Hit The Road: India - Trailer from Manana Films on Vimeo.

Remember the Challenge21 initiative? It was the ambitious project by climber/photographer Jake Norton to summit the three highest peaks on each of the seven continents in an effort to raise awareness of the importance of safe, clean drinking water in developing countries across the world. The project was launched a couple of years back and the team behind it have been diligently working away towards their goals while facing an uphill struggle to find funding and link their message to their efforts in the mountains. That hasn't been an easy task and it looks like Challenge 21 is going through a bit of a refocusing phase as Jake and company search to find new ways to spread the word on how important having a source of clean drinking water really is.

In a recent post to the Challenge21 blog, Jake talks openly about these struggles while also pointing out that the project has been a great success. Since its start, Challenge21 has reached more than 1 million people and raised over $260,000 for Water For People. But at the same time he feels the organization can do more and that he needs to broaden the appeal of the project and cast a wider net in spreading the message that he had originally intended. With that in mind, Jake and his team will continue climbing, but he is finding new ways to link the story he wants to tell with the natural spaces that he visits.

The blog post also included the announcement of an upcoming expedition which will see Jake joined by Pete McBride and David Morton as they travel to India to make the first ascent of Chaukhumba IV a 6885 meter (22,589 ft) at the headwaters of the Ganges River. After they've summited that peak, the team intends to then travel source-to-sea, documenting life on the Ganges, which is one of the most important rivers in the world, but culturally and environmentally. It also happens to be one of the most polluted in the world. The dichotomy of these things will be part of the story that they tell as we follow these three men down a river that is considered sacred to hundreds of millions of people.

Stay tuned for more information on this expedition as it gets underway later this year. It should be well documented and feature some great stories both from the mountains of India and the river that plays such a significant role in that country's identity.

For my final blog post at the end of my language program, I wanted to give an example of what I’ve learned this summer. I asked a couple other Marathi language students if they would help me film a short dialogue for this project. They gracefully said yes if they got to wear “disguises” and we began with just an outline of how we wanted the conversation to go- that is to say this video was not scripted. We are all still learning and I am also still learning how to translate so I tried to keep the translated subtitles as true to what I understood the dialogue to be as possible.


            This summer I started at next to nothing as a false beginner in Marathi and have progressed to reading and writing in a new alphabet and speaking in short, simple sentences. This is sincerely one of my greatest accomplishments and something I’ve wanted to learn for almost all of my life. I’m extremely happy with my progress although I still have a long way to go.



             This program was beneficial not only because I learned the bare bone basics of Marathi but it also kick started my academic career in South Asia and put me in contact with wonderful scholars. I’m overwhelmingly grateful for the support I received from the Sigur Center and from the department of Anthropology at GWU to pursue these studies this summer and I look forward to returning to Pune and AIIS very soon.



Jessica Chandras, PhD Anthropology
Sigur Center 2013 Summer Language Fellow

American Institute of Indian Studies, Marathi Summer Language Program, Pune, India

Here's a great story of a father and son duo who traveled through the Himalaya with one another on motorcycles, covering 4500 km (2800 miles) in the process. The son is an experienced motocross rider to whom being on the back of a bike is second nature. The father was new this type of travel but the pair bonded over their shared adventure through some pretty amazing landscapes. The entire journey was captured on GoPro cameras of course and makes for quite the compelling short film.

When learning a new language, students are often encouraged to use that language as much as possible. As a beginner to Marathi, the language I’m studying this summer in India, daily I proceed through a slow slog to find the words I want to say in Marathi when the English words are on the tip of my tongue. So, knowing that I should try to speak the new language as much as I can, I’m finding it both a blessing and a curse that English is used so much in Marathi. One example is that the word for “table” in Marathi is “table.” Table is just one of hundreds of English words that have found their way into the daily speech of Marathi speakers.

On the one hand, because there are so many English words is Marathi it makes communication easy. Since I am learning Marathi I am told to use as much Marathi as possible. The Marathi words that I use most are usually conjunctions or connecting words like “and” and “but.” Then, if I do not know a word in Marathi, I can use the English word and most likely the other person will still understand what I am trying to say. The result is that my speech is a mixture of intentionally chosen English and Marathi words that I use to show that I can in fact speak and understand a little Marathi.

On the other hand, speaking so much English in a language is a hindrance because I have become very used to replacing words I may not be certain of in Marathi with their equivalent English words and I may never be corrected as to which of the words are more commonly used- the English word or another word in Marathi. One example of the confusion of how and when to use English in Marathi is my struggle with the word “interesting.” I am one of many Americans who pepper my speech with the word “interesting”: “That’s so interesting!” “I find it interesting that…” I realized that these are phrases I use a lot. I have asked a number of Marathi speakers how to say “interesting” in Marathi and I was told to just use “interesting” in English. I have gleaned that there are words in Marathi that mean something similar to how I use the English word “interesting” in various ways but in these instances Marathi speakers also seem to use the English word.

Another challenge to learning how to use English correctly in Marathi is learning Marathi syntax. Marathi speakers may easily use English words in their speech but their syntax, or word order, is distinctly Marathi while using those words. In what I have been learning, at least in simple sentences, the verb should come at the end of the sentence. Linguistically, Marathi is mostly a subject-object-verb (SOV) language. Simple English sentences place the object at the end of the sentence, so English is a subject-verb-object (SVO) language. So while using English in Marathi, speakers stick to the SOV format and the result is a Marathi sentence with Marathi construction with some English words. This is interesting because it means using words familiar to me in unfamiliar ways for communication in a different language.

Lastly, as I’m becoming more and more familiar with reading Devanagari script I’m finding many English words written in Devanagari. A great deal of what is written on signs was really intimidating to me at first because many words were in Devanagari. However, now that I can slowly read when I begin to sound out a word there is a high probability that the word will actually be an English word. The example below is something commonly seen here- Devanagari script (of English words) with the Roman alphabet translation.

In this picture the blue “State Bank” in the Roman alphabet is exactly the same as the last two words written in blue in Devanagari. And the first word in blue is the word India, but not in English. This mix of multiple languages and multiple scripts makes learning Marathi and Devanagari script an exceptionally challenging but enlightening, and interesting, experience!

Photo credit: http://www.financialexpress.com/news/sbi-may-sell-assets-to-aid-recovery/1125820. June 6, 2013

Jessica Chandras, PhD student, Anthropology
Sigur Center 2013 Summer Language Fellow
AIIS Pune, Marathi Summer Language Program, India

Looking for a little inspiration for your own adventures? Then you'll certainly want to watch the video below which features 80 year old Simon Gandolfi riding his motorcycle through the remote Indian state of Himachal Pradesh which falls squarely in the Himalaya Mountains. Road conditions are somewhat less than ideal but the views are spectacular. We should all be so lucky to be enjoying life like this while in our 80's.

For my second post from India while on a a grant for Asian language study from the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, here is a little taste of my transportation routine. While my Marathi language program continues for a few more weeks, I thought I'd share some videos of my adventures with various modes of transportation in Pune, India from my own perspective. This video includes recordings taken from auto rickshaws, scooter, car, and by foot. All are ways I daily brave the streets of Pune. 

Music- Paule Chalti Pandharichi Vaat by Pralhad Shinde & Madhukar Pathak.

Jessica Chandras, PhD Anthropology
Sigur Center 2013 Summer Language Fellow
AIIS Pune, Marathi Summer Language Program, India

Namaste! I have now been in my home away from home in the city of Pune, India for two weeks.

My name is Jessica Chandras and I’m going into my second year of the PhD program in Anthropology at the George Washington University. I plan to do research on the fascinating intersections of language and identity in the state of Maharashtra, India. To prepare for my future research I am spending the summer learning Marathi in Maharashtra- a state in India where Marathi is spoken. I am acclimating well to the rigorous American Institute of Indian Studies Marathi language program. I am gratefully able to attend this program through a grant for Asian language study in Asia from the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the GWU’s Elliott School for International Affairs. In just two weeks I am pleased to say I have made progress from almost no knowledge of Marathi to a beginner who can speak, read, and write basic sentences! It is a short time that I have been here so far, but living with a host family and studying the language where it is spoken speeds up the process of learning both the language and also about Punekar* life and culture.

Studying a language is an exceptionally rich way to learn about the people who speak that language. Often the first words learned in a new language tell a great deal about what is important to locals for daily interaction as well as their shared values and beliefs. This may seem like common sense, but I think that recognizing why you learn the first words you do in a new language provides an interesting window into the culture. For example, I notice that much of the vocabulary that I am learning at the beginning of my studies is related to temples and religion. In the US you would not learn this vocabulary in a classroom, let alone in the first weeks of learning English. Yet vocabulary related to temples and religion is extremely important here and the people who live where I am studying. I have also found that knowing some basic words related to these topics, while seemingly random, has come in quite handy!

A day or two before I arrived in Pune the monsoon season began. In my first days here I often got caught outside soaking wet in the heavy, warm, but greatly needed rain. Understanding how important the rain is and how welcome the rainy season is makes it easy to understand why I quickly learned the word for umbrella. I also learned a useful phrase that translates to “a big rain came” and the word for monsoon. However, even after two weeks I do not know the word for “good morning.” I’ve listened to how people greet each other and either people say Namaste or nothing at all. Therefore, it is not extremely important that I know how to say “good morning," although it is a phrase I use daily in the US, since it is not used in the cultural context of morning interactions here. Therefore, it is important when learning a new language to not just try to speak English in the new language, but to speak the language in its cultural context.

I also found that I use the words “here” and “there” quite a bit. These words were not the first words I learned in other languages but I did not need them as much as I need them now. Each morning I take an auto rickshaw to class and this provides an excellent opportunity to try out new words and phrases. Then I realized that I had probably learned these words and phrases specifically because the people I interact with knew I would take rickshaws and they did not want me to get lost. A lot could happen when I put myself in an old, rusty automobile by myself for a relatively great distance and time with a non-English speaker, so I thank my local teachers for arming me with a basic rickshaw themed vocabulary. In addition to “here” and “there,” my vocabulary also includes “stop,” “change,” “left,” “right,” and “thank you.” "Thank you" is difficult for me because locals do not frequently thank one another, and if they do, the English word is used. I incorporate the word for thank you (dhanyavad) into my speech because it is a distinctly American habit to say thank you to everyone for everything. I think this is an excellent example of how hard it can be to speak the culture and not just the language.

Apart from vocabulary, another linguistic concept impressed upon me early as a beginner in Marathi was the honorific tense used to speak respectfully to older individuals and those of higher status. Through this linguistic construction I have come to understand my place in relation to other individuals and that there is a rather rigid social hierarchy in place that one must abide by to avoid offending anyone. These social rules are acted out behaviorally and also through language. For example, just to ask someone how they are feeling I first need to go through a mental checklist to arrive at what is hopefully the correct linguistic expression for the number of people, the gender of those people, and level of respect they deserve.

I know this is still very early to comment profoundly on the new language and culture I am immersed in but this post can serve both as a record of my introduction to life and language in Pune and also assist others who may be beginning a new language abroad. I look forward to continuing to learn and document my adventure learning the Marathi language and culture while in Pune this summer!

* What someone from Pune is called.


Jessica Chandras, PhD Anthropology
Sigur Center 2013 Summer Language Fellow
AIIS Pune, Marathi Summer Language Program, India

Almost two years ago I posted a story about Rupert Gray, an Englishman who was about to embark on an epic cross country road trip in his classic 1936 Rolls Royce. Rupert and his wife spent six months driving their car across the expanse of India, visiting every corner of the sub-continent. Their journey took them to the foot-hills of the Himalaya to the shores of the Indian Ocean, and just about everywhere in between.

That eye-opening adventure was documented by Rover Films and you'll find a teaser video of the final film below. It is a beautiful travelogue that captures the joy of the open road with the wonder of exploring distant lands. The video will inspire you to take a road trip of your own, just as soon as you can locate your vintage car. Learn more at Grand Trunk Road, the official site for the film.

Grand Trunk Road (teaser) from Rover Films on Vimeo.

 

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Shashwat Gautam (GW MBA 2013) student reflects on his experience as the only International Student Association Senator:

Shashwat Gautam’s home state of Bihar, India is one of the poorest in the country. The politics are corrupt, the people are poor and most have not pursued education past high school.

Now, as Gautam finishes his MBA in May and wraps up his term as a graduate Student Association senator, he plans to return to his hometown of Motihari to run for state assembly in 2015. Gautam said he thinks the lessons he’s learned navigating through red tape at GW will give him a leg up. [read more…]

Ink's the best restaurant in L.A. By that I mean, they serve the most unique and delicious food in town... and in a friendly, comfortable atmosphere. I eat there a lot and always try to sit in the same seat at the counter. Eventually I got to meet a lot of the people who work there. And one of them was 34 year old chef/owner Michael Voltaggio, who had his moment of Top Chef glory before I had started watching the show or even knew I could get Bravo on my TV.

I could tell immediately that Voltaggio is on fire for food. He obsesses over every dish-- and this is the kind of restaurant where nothing on the menu is in a recipe book or available at any other restaurant. It's all his creation-- like a song or a painting. I worked as a chef in Amsterdam for four years and I grokked the compulsion from the first conversation almost a year ago. But that's not why I go there so often. I go there because the food is so good and so unique; nothing like it anywhere, not even Bazaar, the other "molecular gastronomy" place in town where I used to eat all the time, never knowing Michael was Chef de Cuisine.

One day I told Michael and Cole, the other chef, that I was going to India for a month and I'd see them when I got back. Michael mentioned he had been to India not long ago, starting a restaurant. I found that fascinating of course, especially because I had been to Mumbai so many times over the years-- since it's where the Indian music business is and Warners had a subsidiary there-- and it was in the Colaba neighborhood, down the street from the Taj Hotel, that Michael and his brother Bryan were working on opening an American food restaurant.

If you ever googled Voltaggio you were overwhelmed with information. Everything about his life and his work is online-- except India. There's almost nothing about his time in India available. A couple tweets and two or three mentions in a local Mumbai city guide type paper, Mumbai Boss. Mumbai "foodies went into salivation overdrive," according to a local restaurant reviewer when word leaked out that the Voltaggios were coming to town. “It’s better to keep expectations low,” said the 27 year old partners who took over the space, a former Italian restaurant, Ranbir Batra and Rohan Talwar, in March of 2010. Eventually I figured out that the restaurant, Ellipsis, opened but that neither Michael nor Bryan was there. In fact, Michael had just opened Ink when he was flying over to Mumbai to help Batra and Talwar figure out how to start a restaurant from scratch in India. I started asking Michael about it. He's an incredibly friendly, polite guy and he always said he'd be happy to talk about it so... several months later we finally sat down and did.

Someone asked Michael, who grew up in Maryland and worked in at the Greenbriar in West Virginia, the Ritz in Naples, Florida, Dry Creek in Healdsberg and at the Langham in Pasadena, how he likes L.A. He said all he ever sees is the inside of his kitchen. That may be an exaggeration-- as you can see from the video down at the bottom-- but pretty much everything revolves around being a chef. Same with travel. He loves it. But whether it was a trip to Mexico, to Spain, to Singapore, or his excellent adveture in Mumbai, all the stuff normal travelers and tourists do took backseat to chef stuff. In fact, he's been all over the world but he's never been anywhere for a vacation. In Mexico he was looking for fresh seafood that isn't available in L.A.-- and visiting Valle de Guadalupe, the Mexican wine country in Baja California. In Spain he was learning about how they make ceramic plates. and in India... the restaurant. He'd fly over for a couple weeks at a time, sometimes he'd be there, some times Bryan would be there. I guess you could call them hands-on consultants or hands-off-chefs.

By the time Ellipsis opened Michael was working full time back at Ink (plus all the other stuff that seems to take him on the road half the time). He's never seen Ellipsis in action. I couldn't get much out of him about his experience there, beyond how excited he was to work with fresh Indian spices and how tough it was to get imported ingredients in a free-standing restaurant (India's weird that way) but I read something about Talwar and Batra enthusing about “modern American cuisine, and how the Voltaggios were helping develope the menu and were instrumental in training the staff, including chef de cuisine Rupam Bhagat (a Mumbai native who had worked with the Voltaggios in the U.S.).

He was excited, of course, to experience another culture-- and India's is about as "other" as you're going to find-- but "when you go someplace," he explained, "you have a plan and the plan changes and you're not in control of the situation... Reality was the difficulty of going into a foreign country and doing a good job."

I haven't eaten there. My last trip to India was to Cochin and Delhi and those links are about the restaurants in each, although the Delhi one is from a trip there in 2007. The reviews of Ellipis at Trip Advisor are great: "the food was absolutely amazing, the cocktails were great, the place is decked out brilliantly, the service attentive and we would highly recommend this place to anyone," came from a Brit. And American tourist was as enthusiastic: "All I can say is that my meal was fantastic, cooked exactly as I ordered and was delicious. The exact same sentiments were echoed by everyone at the table. However, the biggest surprise was awaiting us all. We decided on the Rocky Road Ice Cream for dessert. What we got seemed to be a hand-made concoction of chocolate ice cream with nuts, marshmallows and more, glazed over with chocolate that seemed to have been frozen with liquid nitrogen, a fog covering the plate. Though hard as a rock we started picking it to death with our spoons and we were all delighted with the presentation and the dessert itself. I do have to admit I was the one that finished off this huge mound of ice cream. Impressions completed and they were high. Overall, the whole experience of Ellipsis was excellent. The biggest drawback is perhaps the price, which was close to $400 USD for four, but we did have 2-3 drinks apiece which inflated the bill considerably. However, I don't care how much it was, it made for us another memory of our first trip to India and Mumbai and for the beginning of a new year. I highly recommend Ellipsis..."

If you're closer to L.A., try Ink. There's nothing like it. Best Hamachi dish I ever tasted; best black cod I ever tasted. Best corn dish I ever tasted. Best cuttlefish I ever tasted.

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When I got to India the first time, having driven my VW van across Asia, I was just getting out of my teens. I entered in the Punjab, drove to Delphi, Bombay, Goa, through Kerala, took the ferry across to Ceylon for a few months, then drove to Pondicherry, Madras, north through Andhra Pradessh and Orissa (where Tom Wolf, probably the next governor of Pennsylvania was serving in the Peace Corps at the time), on to Calcutta, Benares and up into Nepal for a couple months, Oh, and what fun it was! I'll spare you the unsavory details of what the Kabul Runs entails, but I can still remember the first time I realized that the slab of dead animal hanging from a hook in every (unrefrigerated) marketplace across Asia was black because it was covered in flies.

Around a decade later, one of my closest friends, at least in part inspired by my stories of India, the painter Eveline Pommier, traveled to India, contracted cholera and died, not yet 30. India has never been-- and never will be-- at least not in our lifetimes-- a walk in the park. Anyone who forgets this a trip to India is a serious undertaking, vacation, business trip, spiritual pilgrimage or what-- is putting their health and even their life in jeopardy.

Years later, Roland and I were driving around Rajasthan when we stopped for dinner at a high-end restaurant in Jaipur. Yum, yum. Afterwards we were walking around town and we wound up back behind the restaurant, where we saw some small boys filling up the bottled water they had been serving from a hose. I keep traveling to the Third World-- we were back in India last Christmas, for example-- and the hygiene everywhere is... spotty. On our way to a wonderful restaurant in Bamako a few years ago, perhaps the only really "wonderful" restaurant in the whole country, we counted a number of people using the public sidewalk to squat down and... well... #2. You get used to it. Or you go to Disneyland or, maybe, London and Paris, instead.

A couple days ago I was driving around L.A. listening to Terry Gross interview Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid about his new book, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Hamid isn't some Pakistani bumpkin or, despite his previous book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a fundamentalist, a movie version of which opens next month. He spent a lot of his childhood in Palo Alto and earned degrees from Princeton and Harvard. How to Get Filthy Rich seems to be set in his hometown (and where he lives now), Lahore, a city I first visited in 1969 (when it had a million people; today it has 10 million). Wonderful place!

The main character in Filthy Rich, which is actually written like a weird How-To book, feels his best way to get rich is through a series of scams, a tried and true tradition across cultures, as we've seen in the History Channel series, The Men Who Built America. Hamid's character doesn't seem all that foreign when he takes goods that have expired and makes labels for them with longer shelf lives. Eventually he strikes it rich by boiling tap water and selling it as expensive mineral water. When I mentioned it to Roland, he seemed relieved. "At least," he said, "he was boiling it."

"[T]he marketization of water, the sort of application of a kind of uber-capitalism that you see really all over the world and certainly in Pakistan, is in some senses you can see it most clearly in water because water used to be almost free. You could get water, you know, from a river, from a canal, from a well, from wherever. And now, of course, we're running out of clean water in most of Asia and much of Africa and much of Latin America. And so people don't have clean drinking water. And we can live for a month without food, but we can't last more than a couple of days without water. So people are selling water, and both at the luxury level, where you have these high-end mineral waters and also at the level of just poor people needing something to drink. So his scam is to take mineral water bottles that have been consumed at high-end restaurants, buy the empties, take tap water, boil it a little bit, pour it into these mineral water bottles and reseal it so it looks like it's an authentic water bottle and sell it back to the exact same restaurants, who probably suspect that it's a scam product, but because it's so much cheaper than the water they buy normally are happy to take it on." The book, Gross explains in her introduction "is both a satire of self-help books and an examination of life in an Asian city with a growing middle class and an infrastructure that can't support it, except for the crime infrastructure, which is thriving."

This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia, and to do that, it has to find you huddled, shivering on the packed earth under your mother's cot one cold, dewy morning... I originally didn't want to write it as a self-help book. I was trying to write this as a straight novel, and as usually happens with me, I did that for a couple of years and failed and eventually stumbled across this self-help book form. And what I liked about the self-help book form was I started to realize that in a way I actually do write novels to help myself.

...I think it's a story that is a type of story that is common in Pakistan, but more than Pakistan in the entire world, because something like half the world's people now live in cities for the first time in human history. But in the course of the next generation, 25, 30 years, that number is going to go to 80 or 90 percent, which means a couple billion people are going to move to cities in Asia and Africa and Latin America, all over the world. And I think there's a lot of similarity between going from a poor countryside to a Third World megacity, which is a journey that these billions of people are on. So in a sense this is a story of that mass migration in Pakistan but also elsewhere.

Gross mentions the rotting water pipes and how "the contents of underground water mains and sewers mingling with the result that taps in locales rich and poor alike disgorge liquids that while for the most part clear and often odorless reliably contain trace levels of feces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery and typhoid." Hamid's wife was diagnosed with hepatitis the day after their wedding. "And it was the second time she had had it," he said. "Virtually everybody in my family has had either hepatitis or typhoid or something of that sort. You know, water-borne illness is everywhere. It affects the poor, and it also affects the affluent in a place like Pakistan... [Y]ou get it from either drinking water, you know, brushing your teeth with tap water, or perhaps somebody prepared your food, and they had washed their hands in that water or touched the water or hadn't washed their hands at all. I mean it's-- the mode of transmission is what's called oral-fecal, and that sort of unsavory term really sums up how you get it." His character, the bottled water scammer millionaire had hepatitis too.

[H]e has it as a boy, and so many of us had it, and it's a strange situation. You know, living in America, where in most cities you can drink tap water, and even so, people do have bottled water, but the tap water is perfectly safe to drink almost all the time, there is an enormous difference in a society where you can do that and a society where you cannot do that. And most of the world actually you cannot do that. So the government, the state, hasn't performed the basic, basic service of taking this most common of all commodities that we use and making it safe for everybody to drink as they please.

Not even in Poland Springs, Maine.

Low wage workers at the Poland Springs Bottling Plant in Maine, which is owned by Nestlé, are so angry with the way the company treats them that they're doing pretty disgusting things to pollute the water-- not that Nestlé gives a damn. Nestlé settled a law suit accusing it of using water under a former trash and refuse dump, and below an illegal disposal site where human sewage was sprayed as fertilizer for many years. Nestlé paid $10 million in the settlement but continues to sell the same Maine water under the Poland Spring name.

And they make a lot of money selling that crap too. People are trying to get their hands on money now... everywhere. And many will do anything to get it.

The 2013 Piolets d’Or (Golden Axe) nominees were announced yesterday, spotlighting some of the biggest and boldest mountaineering feats of last year. Six expeditions were given the nod, including a couple of climbs that we followed closely as they unfolded throughout 2012. Each of the six nominees climbed peaks of at least 6000 meters (19,685 ft) in height. Three of the climbs took place in Pakistan, two in India and one in Nepal.

The six nominees include the following expeditions:

• South Face of the Ogre in Pakistan by Kyle Dempster, Hayden Kennedy, and Josh Wharton
• Complete Mazeno Ridge on Nanga Parbat in Pakistan by Sandy Allan and Rick Allen
• Northeast Spur of Muztagh Tower in Pakistan by Dmitry Golovchenko, Alexander Lange, and Sergey Nilov
• Southwest Face of Kamet in India by Sébastien Bohin, Didier Jourdain, Sébastien Moatti, and Sébastien Ratel
• Northeast Ridge of Shiva in India by Mick Fowler and Paul Ramsden
• South Pillar of Kyashar in Nepal by Tatsuya Aoki, Yasuhiro Hanatani and Hiroyoshi Manome

The winners of this years awards will be announced at a mountain festival to be held in Chamonix, France and Courmayeur, Italy from April 3-6. The selection will be made by an all-star jury that consists of British climbing legend Stephen Venables; Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, the first woman to climb all the 8,000-meter peaks without supplementary oxygen; Slovenian climber Silvo Karo; and Japanese mountaineer Katsutaka “Jumbo” Yokoyama.

Each of these expeditions is worthy of gaining recognition, but I am completely biased in favor of the Mazeno Ridge ascent. What Sandy Allan and Rick Allen accomplished over 18-days on that climb is simply amazing and for my money is one of the boldest mountaineering expeditions in a half-century. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they earn a little recognition for their climb.

Congratulations to everyone who was nominated and good luck!

Kerala doesn't have a restaurant culture. People eat with their families at home or are too poor to eat in what we would call restaurants. When I first visited in 1970, I recall the food being very spicy and served on banana leaves. Kerala has been developed into a major tourist destination since then and there are a lot more hotels and restaurants catering to the needs of both domestic and international tourists.

Getting into the native foods of the places I visit are part of why I live travel so much. And the food of South India is very, very different from the food of North India, the food people in the States and Europe are usually talking about when they mention "Indian food." And the food in South India is different from region to region. In Kerala, the Malayalam cuisine is obviously based on the local ingredients-- coconuts, spices (cardamom, chili, tumeric, coriander, cloves, ginger, cinnamon, pepper, cumin, etc), fish, rice, fruits and vegetables...

The tourist guide books for Kerala all celebrate the restaurants in the luxury hotels. With no real restaurant culture, they've long been the places where you could get hygienic and good-tasting food. But not remotely Keralan food. The Keralan food served in the 5-star hotel restaurants is made for elderly Brits and German-- very nearly tasteless. To say the spice factor is cut back to a minimum is a joke. Top rated restaurants in Ft. Kochi (Cochin) are expensive and attempt to be as European-friendly as they can. Fodor, for example, recommends The History at the exclusive hotel, Brunton Boatyard. It wasn't bad-- not at all-- but it was completely forgettable, uninteresting and way over-priced. We ate there on our first night. After that we asked everyone where we could find the best authentic Keralan cooking. There was a consensus and we found the Pavilion at the modest Abad Hotel in Chullickal, a one dollar tuk-tuk ride from Ft. Kochi. We ate there half a dozen times, and not because it was so shockingly inexpensive. We ate there so often because the food was absolutely delicious-- and because they didn't tone it down just because we're white.

Neither of us even had so much as a loose movement the whole time we were in Kerala. The food was healthy, clean, delicious and nutritious.As long as I'm bringing up body functions, there is one thing I want to mention. This is the "cool" and "dry" season-- relatively-- but it never drops below 90 degrees and it's so humid that nothing gets dry. So we're drinking water al the time. And sweating out out. I've rarely consumed as much water but rarely pissed as infrequently. It all gets sweated out. It's essential that if you visit Kerala you drink a lot of water-- a lot more than usual.

The last time-- and only time until this week-- I was in Kerala, a long skinny coastal state in southwest India, was 1970. I had left Goa, after a fantastic couple of months of recuperating from the arduous drive across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India, and was headed towards the island paradise of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Kerala is between Goa and what was then the ferry point you could take to northern Ceylon (long closed due to a civil war that raged for almost the whole time since I left until very recently).

I only remember 5 things about the week it took me in 1970 to traverse Kerala, not counting how abysmal the roads were. I remember the state was lush, green and gorgeous with incredible unspoiled beaches and no tourists. I remember visiting an old French colony called Mahe in the northern part of the state which was administratively part of Pondicherry, the 3 scattered ex-French enclaves in India, and that it was far more orderly than the rets of this chaotic and completely dysfunctional country. I remember that the spicy cuisine was delicious and simple and served on banana leaves (although some rudimentary roadside slop houses weren't high-falutin enough for banana leaves and would put the food directly onto the wooden tables... pretty revolting and seared into my memory. I never saw any silverware in Kerala.) I also remember visiting a shuttered on Jewish synagogue in Cochin that some local boys opened up for us but they couldn't speak much English and we didn't learn much other than that the Jews had all gone to Israel. And finally, I recall that south of Trivandum, the state capital, some inept dacoits (bandits) tried to waylay us with a giant boulder rolled into the middle of the road. There was enough room to drive around it and escape.

Kerala has come a long way since then. It's a relatively wealthy state now and has been successfully promoted the way Florida was in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s-- a beautiful, unspoiled tropic vacation paradise. The explosively expanding Indian middle class likes vacationing here. So do Europeans. When I checked out the best hotels on Ft. Kochi, one of the islands that makes up Cochin-- the best of the islands-- they were all over-priced and booked up. Our first choice in any case is to rent a house. So we did. This one is a brand new apartment overlooking the Arabian Sea, a little way (5-10 minute walk) from the hustle and bustle of the real touristy parts of the island. It's nothing too fancy but there are two bedooms, with their own bathrooms, a kitchen/dining area, a living room and air-conditioning units for each room. The owner, a young guy, Varghese John, somehow pronounced Valdez, lives downstairs and is a perfect host-- as well as a great cook. A lady comes in and cleans every other day and does the laundry, changes the bedding ,etc. The hot water works and so does the wifi-- more or less. The electricity goes out for half an hour twice a day-- from 7-7:30 every morning and from 9-9:30 every evening, but that's a function of Kerala, not the house. His e-mail address is varju@rediffmail.com/ If you want to visit Cochin and stay here, mention this blog or my name to Verghese and he'll give you a 10% discount.

Roland and I are only the second guests to have stayed here; it's that new. Two weeks ago Cochin had a big music festival-- it's in swing 'til March-- and M.I.A. (Maya), a U.K. pop star/rapper-- from Sri Lanka-- headlined and she and her family stayed in our house. They were the first guests. Her father was a well-known Tamil activist. She got into some kind of twitter argument with Anderson Cooper after she felt he implied she's a terrorist (which she isn't). Her 2007 second album, Kala a U.S. dance-electronic hit, went gold. Outside of the underground dance world she's best known in the U.S. for having written "Give Me All Your Luvin'" with Madonna and for performing it at the Super Bowl XLVI half time show. This video isn't that. "Born Free" is considered, like M.I.A. herself, controversial. I wonder how she went over in sleepy, very Christian Cochin.

The Delhi subway system is fast and cheap-- but best avoided unless there are riots up top

Not counting teenage hitchhiking adventures to Canada and Mexico, the first time I traveled abroad was right after my 20th birthday. My girlfriend and I got special $99 tickets on Iceland Air for Luxembourg. (If you stopped over in Iceland, you got the $99 price-- and we were delighted to stop over in Iceland and spend a week driving around the dramatic lunar-scape of an island.) Anyway, when we got to Luxembourg we had no idea where to go or what to do. The next day we had to take a train to Weisbaden in Germany to pick up our VW van. So we checked into a cheap hotel near the central station that seemed, in the dark night, medieval and charming. It turned out to be one of those hotels where working girls brought their tricks for an hour. You live and you learn.

So I'm in Delhi for a week, waiting for Roland, enjoying India's fantastic capital-- great sites, nice weather, old friends, amazing restaurants and a wonderful place to get used to India before moving on to more exotic parts of the country. I was last here 2 or 3 years ago and I stayed at the Intercontinental and loved it. It was the least expensive 5-star hotel in town and it was a hassle-free enjoyable week for me and, most important, it was really close-- 10-15 minute walk-- to the center of town (Connaught Place). So, of course, I wanted to book us rooms there for this trip. But it was gone. Online, the hotel had ceased to exist. I finally tracked it down and it was now called Eros. That put me off. Was it some kind of weird sex hotel for Arabs and sleazy Indians? No, as further investigation showed me, it is heavily advertised as being managed by Hilton. OK, I figured Eros must mean something different in India.

It's part of the Eros Group and, as their website says, it's "a company, which needs no introduction!" Apparently they're giants in the real estate industry and in the hotel world as well. "Hospitality Industry (Eros Hotel Managed by Hilton at Nehru Place, Shangri-La's-- Eros Hotel at Connaught Place, Hotel Double Tree and Hotel Hilton at Mayur Vihar- city's most prestigious 5 star deluxe hotels)-- are an absolute spectacle of immaculate architecture. Group is also coming up with a new Residential Township-- Eros Sampoornam (25 acres) in Greater Noida (Noida Extension) and five star hotels-- Eros Radisson Blue Hotel (72000 sq ft) in Faridabad and RJS Hotel (4.5 acres). With more than six decades as a leading maestro in real estate promotion and town planning, the Eros Group ranks as the natural choice for smart decision makers like you. With Eros Group one can take excellent complex environment for granted." OK, what could go wrong?

The hotel's website says it's "centrally located at Nehru Place, with easy access to business and tourist destinations." Sounded like the place I stayed in, although I wasn't 100% positive. I called and they said, yes, they took over the old Intercontinental. The price was decent and the on-line reviews sounded fine. When I got here, it was 4AM and it looked the same. Emirates Air-- the most over-hyped airline ever-- had a car drive me from the airport to the hotel and it didn't seem like he was going the right way, but what the heck. Most of these cookie cutter business hotels seem the same and they were kind enough to check me in at 4AM. The room looked exactly the same as the Intercontinental, although the place seemed very remodeled. It wasn't until the next day-- when I tried walking to Connaught Place for lunch-- that I figured out I was 10 miles from Connaught Place and that there had been two Intercontinentals and that the one I had stayed in is now the Lalit Hotel.

This one doesn't suck-- except for their internet use scam. It's just not a hotel I would normally stay in if there were better choices (which, in Delhi, there are-- dozens of better choices). Roland arrived a few days after I did on the same Emirates flight that got him here at 4AM. Instead of welcoming him and showing him to his room after an 18 hour flight, they figured he would be ripe for a rip-off and told him it was be $200 to allow him into his room before 8AM. Luck of the draw. I had a kind desk clerk; Roland got a crook. (When we complained to the manager she told me that Roland's experience was the normal one and that what had happened to me was "impossible.")

Roland pays attention to toiletries and he says the hotel's stuff-- by Peter Thomas Roth-- is top notch. I never heard of them. What I do know is that the hotel charges $10/day for their internet connection and their internet connection is beyond horrible. It's barely useable and, on average, it takes me 20-30 minutes to open and e-mail and reply. Something like 75% of the replies then vanish. Google mail works better than AOL, which has been almost impossible to use here. Twitter and reddit don't function at all and basically, if it isn't google-related, it doesn't work. Most of the name there's no connectivity. A couple goofs from the IT Department came up to my room and installed a booster, which didn't do any good at all.

Instead of a 10-15 minute walk to Connaught Place, it's a 20 minute subway ride (with a transfer). I don't remember Delhi-- or anyplace in India-- even having a subway system. Turns out this one got started in 2002, although the line out to where I am opened in 2010. They're still building. It's the most crowded subway I've ever been on anywhere... ever. Words can't describe. They haven't quite figured out how to sell tickets-- which involves gigantic lines and amazing amounts of wasted time. This being India, the world's most defiantly dysfunctional place, they don't allow you to buy return trips. Fortunately, the first car on every train is strictly reserved for women. If you don't think that's important, the biggest story in Delhi for the week we've been here so far-- dominating the front page and next 4 pages of every newspaper-- is about a young woman who was gang-raped on a bus and how common it is for women to be sexually harassed. The whole city had practically been shut down by the protests over the episode and the woman was so brutally assaulted that she may die and has already had her intestines removed.

People blame the police because they spend such an inordinate amount of their assets protecting a couple hundred VIP families and leaving the rest of society to fend for itself. What's odd about that is that Delhi is the most paranoid city I've ever been in when it comes to security. Every opportunity there is for a pat-down and an x-ray machine, you find someone patting you down and x-raying you. Every subway station, every hotel, every bank... these people are insane. The real lack of security is that the subways are so packed with sick people that disease must spread like wildfire all the time. Every time I get off one I take a few Mushroom Science Immune Builders, my own kind of paranoia prevention. It didn't do any good in the end and I came down with a bad cold or something.

The Metro got us to Chandi Chawk, the main drag of Old Delhi, a short and fascinating walk from Jama Masjid, the biggest mosque in India, completed in 1656 and pictured (with me in the foreground) above

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