The End of an Internship

My internship is over and I have just posted a new set of pictures from the debriefing in Delhi that reunited six of the seven interns sent to India by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute. The set of Brought to you by links that featured my sponsoring organizations that was to your right, my left, has also been taken down in a small traditional sunrise link removal ceremony with much incense and HTML. The set of pictures includes some from the Canadian High Commissioner to India’s crib, a sit-in by Bhopal disaster survivors, multiple draggings of my co-workers to the Baha’i House of Worship and pictures of us waiting for food. A number of us stuck together for the following days going from place to place stuffing our faces with food. We proved to be perfectly suited co-tourists after having spent the past six months in different parts of India, we were all much more interested in eating than partaking of all the temples, museums and shopping Delhi has to offer.

CIDA’s International Youth Internship Program

To Canadian students nearing the end of just about any degree program I would recommend for them to check out CIDA’s International Youth Internship Program. The listings for next year’s positions should be posted very soon here. I would say that it is probably the best international internship program available to Canadians interested in development out there and disciplines range from Accounting to Zoology. The money comes originally from Human Resources Development Canada then to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) then to many Canadian NGO’s that have applied for internships, who then hire the interns however they choose, train them and send them to THEIR partners overseas.

Even though there are hundreds of positions up for grabs, expect tough competition from other canditates that are smarter, more expireinced, charming and good-looking than you. Applying for positions last summer became something of an occupation for me as I was taking the last classes of my degree with many afternoons of hustling. By the numbers, I applied for 20 positions in 9 different countries from 7 NGOs, was shortlisted for 8 positions, did 3 interviews, got the 1 offer and a partridge in a pear tree.

Click here for CIDA’s website for the Progam. My Canadian organizations The Shastri-Indo Canadian Institute and Queen’s University, and my Indian host organization The University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad.

University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad Photos Posted

Within a few weeks from my arrival to the university that was to become my home for the past six months, I began to get a handle on it and realize that it is really just a small village populated by the usual things like laborers, goats, cows, fields and temples, only with more scientists. Posted in this new set are my best pictures from within the massive campus grounds featuring stunning images of things you might find there such as seeds, worms and Ethiopians.

Their homepage: http://www.uasd.edu/

Here is an image from my going away lunch that our hostel’s dear nightwatchman Balu hosted at his home.

Naw-Ruz Greeting Video and Naw-Ruz in General

My beloved Flickr has just added video functionality so I am posting here the video Naw-Ruz greeting video I was commissioned by the Ottawa holy day celebration master Sherrie Yazdani to make. She asked all Ottawa Baha’is living far and away to send in short greeting videos to be shown all together at the community’s big Naw-Ruz bash. I’m having difficulty embedding the video in this post so I am going to have to ask you to click here to see it. For the cinematography I called in the highly decorated Ph.D of Agronomy and my beloved co-worker, Dr. U. K. Shanwad.

Naw-Ruz is New Years for Baha’is, Persians and Zoroastrians that lands at the end of the Baha’i period of fasting, the first day of spring and near Easter, Holi, Purim and this year Mawlid an-Nabi and unusual rains in Dharwad caused by a low-pressure zone over the Gulf. It would be fair to say that it is the biggest night many Baha’i communities where friends come dressed to the nines, especially those of the Persian persuasion.

Mawlid an-Nabi in Dharwad

Our Naw-Ruz celebrations in Dharwad were a much more humble affair. After my friend Kumar Naika had to leave Dharwad to Bangalore for employment, the Baha’i Centre sat locked for several months and my high hopes raised from my first visits there fell. That there was a humble affair at all for Naw-Ruz was the result many fasting days of work on the part of my friend Elina and I trying to track down local Baha’is using the vaguest list of humans in all of South India. Elina turned out to possess my same foolish determination required to find people in India complimented by the ablilty to speak Hindi and we got ourselves into enough dead-ends to remind me of my earlier search for Sureka in places that she wasn’t in.

One afternoon as were on a desperate search for a trace of a Baha’i family listed to be in particular neighborhood, we found a clue in the form of a nine-pointed star motif molded in the concrete of a home. The nine pointed star is often used by Baha’is as a unique symbol for the faith. When we saw a second, then third and fourth home bearing our symbol we realized that it was probably too good to be true. When we saw this house that we found to look like the cover of the Baha’i historical text The Dawn-Breakers, we got freaked out and ran away.

Within a few days of our planned Naw-Ruz celebration Elina and I found the key to the Center and I hired two laborers one day after work from my university to help me clean it out after three months of ashes creeping in from various neighbor’s burned garbage. There was also a degree of archeology to it to learn about Dharwad’s dormant community from the photographs, scraps of paper and unpaid bills that were strewn about the place.

BEFORE / AFTER

About a dozen of us celebrated Naw-Ruz together at the Center by candlelight, including three Baha’is, three Muslims, three Hindus, three children and the aforementioned acclaimed cinematographer and it was perfect.

Belguam Photos Posted

Back in September when I learned that I was going to go to some place in India called Dharwad, it was rare to find anyone who had heard of the place, much have been there. Finally, at my last nineteen day feast in Ottawa a friend’s parents not only knew the place but had visited many times.

They were studying in a city called Belguam just next to Dharwad in the early eighties, all illustrated on the map of India the parent immediatly drew for me on a napkin, complete with a little hole ripped out of it for Sri Lanka.

I visited the Baha’i community of Belguam using that Ottawa family’s good name and it eventually became a second home and a place to charge my Bahá’ítteries. I have just posted a set of photos from the green city of Belguam including some from last weekend’s Holi revelry.

Ugar Photos Posted

In December I spent a day in a town further North in Karnataka that sold its soul to the sugar industry - sort of like how Macau has to gambling or Ottawa to government. One can assume Ugar was chosen for its name’s similarity to the name of the product in question.

I went there to learn about how the factory is earning carbon credits for the green energy generation meeting a portion of its factory’s energy use that is based on sugar cane residues as a biofuel. Click here to see where India’s sugar comes from.

Madapur Village Photos Posted

Before I leave it, I am going to post a few sets of photos from the great state of Karnataka like this one of images from the village of Madapur. Back in November before Peter left, we piled into a Jeep with five researchers to sit on the floor of a temple for four days and ask farmers about farming and energy use as the last study village in the project I was working on before the one I am on now.

B W Seleger et al.

Over the past month my new nephew has been making the rounds, winning the hearts all those who have the chance to meet him with relaxed, dynamic personality.

Here are some recent pictures of my recent nephew with members of his family, he’s sleeping in most of them:

With mother/With father

With grandmother/With grandfather

With uncle*

(Pictured baby may be a different baby)

Ridiculous 2004 Fasting Article

The Baha’i world is now on day twelve of the nineteen day fast. The one nineteenth of the year when we abstain from food and liquids while the sun is up. The other eighteen nineteenths are known to me as my love affair with lunch, arguably one of the three most important meals of the day. Today was the second time in my eight-year fasting career that I slept in and missed my chance to take breakfast, also among the three most important meals of the day. What better time than now to post the letter I wrote to my father during my first tropical fast from Yasothon in North-East Thailand in 2004? Through a freak publishing accident, it made to the Canadian Baha’i community’s newsletter magazine, making it the silliest thing ever to be in Baha’i Canada. Here it is, illustrated with pictures of delicious, refreshing and vandalized tropical fruit from my set of photos of food art.

This the most difficult fast I have ever done, Dad. I don’t think you can even begin to understand. You slobs in Canada just skip lunch for a few days, watching the sun shoot through the sky like a comet during your ninety-minute winter day. Days here are near never-ending, yours often-ending, ours endless, yours endfull. This day is a good example; by all indications it has not yet ended, and it does not plan to.

I want to cry but, alas, I can’t, for I am missing the vital, the wet ingredient to make tears, so little grains of salt just discharge from the sides of eyes. If you were to cut my arm off I wouldn’t even bleed, and I wouldn’t mind either because the pain might distract me from my thirst. My blood is so dry it has all become scab. It flows through my veins and arteries in the form of pellets, that roll and bounce through my oxygen-super-highways by way of gravity. I need to stand on my head every ten minutes when I start to become slow so that the pellets of blood will roll to my brain. If I’m too stupid to do it someone has to do it for me. I often regain intelligence to find myself being hung upside-down by a team of worried Thais.

I feel the same way an unfortunate African country must feel to be so chronically in debt that I may never recover. I scrounge some calories in the morning and totally use them within an hour of sunrise, so I borrow calories by eating the inner lining of my own stomach and other measures, putting myself into calorie-debt. My Fast-breaking meals are no more than feeble payments to the service the debt. I have done the math and the only way I can get back on my feet again is to eat a hamburger every hour for the next nineteen years after the fast is over and only drink, cook and bathe using pepsi.

I’m still not sure have begun to understand what it is that I am saying. Well, I hope you will think of me while on your skiing trip Dad, standing on my head and constantly eating processed meat for eternity. Please be careful while sliding down those mountains of cold precipitation.

Bangalore Photos: A Photographic Retrospective in Photos of Bangalore

Don’t let the title of this post and your gullibility to anything written in a blog fool you, Bangalore still exists, arguably more now than ever before.  But as I am leaving the area soon, I’m not planning on going back to that city in a long time so: Bangalore, you are dead to me now.  Presented in this new set of photos are images of butterflies, bears and Baha’is from the late mega-city that should give you a warped idea of what it’s like if you have never been there.  

One Nineteenth

The chilly mornings and nights and windy days over here have made way for unbearable heat. That must signal that one nineteenth of the year in which Baha’i Bloggers and Baha’is alike are abstaining from food and drink from sunrise to sundown has started. Not like the fast my Ethiopian Orthodox roommates do for two sixths of the year where they abstain from animal products, which some do one oneth of the year. More like the one twelfth of the year that Muslims fast except at a different time and length in a solar calendar year.

Fasting in various forms is a practice you can find in nearly every world religion and increasingly as a health practice in its own right. When I was living in the North-East of Thailand in 2004, I was asked to put together a short study group on the subject for a group of youth among whom several were about to have their first fast as many had recently enrolled into the Baha’i Faith or had just reached the critical age of fifteen. While choosing quotations on the topic to be translated to Thai I found that the law of the fast is very closely joined with that of the obligatory daily prayers. This was illustrated in the words of Baha’u'llah with many visual references to illustrate their centrality to Baha’i life as pillars, wings and the sun and moon. We ended the study with some of these quotes and each of us made our own visual translations of the texts. My above drawing from my new set of drawings is based on the following two quotes that can be found in this recent compilation:

“Fasting and obligatory prayer are as two wings to man’s life. Blessed be the one who soareth with their aid in the heaven of the love of God, the Lord of all worlds.” - Baha’u'llah

“Cling firmly to obligatory prayer and fasting. Verily, the religion of God is like unto heaven; fasting is its sun, and obligatory prayer is its moon.” - Baha’u'llah

Coming up: My ridiculous 2004 article on fasting in Thailand, a simplified greywater reuse system and my departure from Dharwad.