Chennai, India

I am way behind in sharing my experiences in India; I have been busy and I have really needed time to process everything about my time there! Life on the ship is soooo incredibly full. A typical day normally starts out not seeming so packed, but then is quickly filled with meetings. While I have a standing 11 o’clock meeting everyday, most of my other meetings are impromptu—faculty and students stop me to talk in the dining hall, in the faculty/staff lounge, in the bathroom, in my office, and my way to and from any of the above places. Basically, there is no place that is “on base” from work talk; faculty need to talk to me about students with academic issues in their classes (poor attendance or performance), students need to talk to me when they are sick and miss class, if they have questions about grades and transfer credits, or if they need general academic support. Every single day they are evening events that call me, too.
In this stretch between Chennai and Alexandria, we have had three sea socials (which are parties for each of the eight seas; think of the “seas” as residence halls on a land campus), a staff member’s 26.25 birthday party, a session on women’s leadership (featuring seven professional women on the ship including yours truly), a panel with the ship’s captain and three major officers, two interviews for students learning anthropological interview skills, a bridge (or command center) tour, and meetings and practice for the Sea Olympics (where I was entered into the synchronized swim competition against my will; I hope my skills from being on the synchronized swim team in fourth grade will come back to benefit me), a facilitation session with students on racial and class privilege called Archie Bunker’s Neighborhood, and a Captain’s Dinner with other faculty where the wine glasses are never empty. All of these excuses aside, I did have a glorious time in India. India is so many things—it’s a menagerie of color, it’s hot, it’s dirty, its beauty is both raw and refined (often at the same time). Visiting India includes an awareness for contradictions--it’s light, it’s dark, it’s spicy, it’s indifferent. People in India are intelligent and proud; they live in gated communities; they are homeless. India is rudimentary and sophisticated, welcoming and joyful, and gut-wrenching sadness.

My time in India began with a wonderful adventure. We arrived in India early in the morning on Monday, October 15th and right away you could smell the city. The air was dense with pollution and intermittent currents of waste, sweat, food, smoke, and exhaust. I took the morning to organize my life. I took a much-needed nap and did some filing and color coding to soothe my nerves. After venturing out into the city with two colleagues for dinner about 30 minutes away from our industrial port, I returned to the ship to meet the group of 28 students and 1 adult whom I would be leading on a three day trip to rural India in a small town called Erode. A wonderful thing about being a trip leader is the opportunity to get a 50% discount on trips. This homestay trip had come highly recommended to me by two of my fellow UVMers and past Semester at Sea staffers, Joe and Joy, so I knew I had to do it. While numerous students boarded planes to the Taj Mahal, we boarded an overnight trip for an eight hour overnight train ride to an area more south and west than Chennai, a city named Erode. The train station itself was an adventure—uber crowded and with the obligatory rats that almost always accompany mass transit stations, we boarded the train. Since we were on the 10:30 PM train, my job was to assign bunks (we did not have sequential bunk reservations) between two cars—each car was complete with double bunks. Lest you think that I was navigating this whole train adventure on my own, I must tell you that I met our logistical host at the station. Dr. Muthusamy and his wife (pictured here) live in Chennai, but they were accompanying us to Erode.
We had been cautioned ahead of time to sleep with our passports and our money on ourselves, keep our overnight bags under heads as pillows, and tie down our shoes. We had one bathroom per car, which, let’s just say was not up to Linda Andres bucket brigade standards. Each bunk was provided with a pillow, two sheets, and a blanket. Curtains could be pulled shut to provide some privacy. Periodically the conductor liked to stick his hand through my curtain to turn the light on and off, via the switch that was somewhat inconveniently for me located near my window. While this and the reverberation of the train were enough to provide me with a mild case of insomnia, I was also pretty worried about the large number of rupees I was carrying on my person. Like any good traveler, I had my personal money and passport secured in a money belt tucked into my pants. However, as trip leader, I had held the task of converting $600 USD into rupees to pay for transportation and to make a donation at a school we were visiting. Since the exchange rate was 39 rupees to every 1 USD, I was carrying a pretty hefty stack of rupees. Already feeling the equanimity of my responsibility for my students and my own tendency to lose important things like money, wallets, keys, passports, etc, I was guaranteed a relatively sleep-free evening.

Arriving in Chennai at 6:30 AM, we split into two groups. One group of ten went with Dr. Muthusamy and his wife to stay with a host family, while I took a group of 20 to meet another family. We had an approximately 45 minute bus ride to the village of Jayaramapuram, where our guest family lived on a huge farm. Our hosts had hosted Semester at Sea participants for 20 years—we were their 39th group to visit. The gargantuan gated farm was owned by Mr. Jayaraman and his wife, but our primary hostess was Mrs. Purni Krishnakumar, who was the daughter-in-law of the Jayaramans.

Purni, in her late30s, had two daughters to help with the tours. All of three of them spoke perfect English. Vedhika, the eldest at 12, loved to read and talk about all she was learning in school. Anniya was seven and a bit more mischievous than Vedhika; she seemed to prefer activities like stealing her sister’s books and chopping off the heads of Barbies. While this seems like a perfect time to launch into a discourse on the perfection of eldest children, I will resist until a later time. Right upon arrival, we were welcomed into the house which was very airy and open, with lots of courtyards.

Mrs. Jayaraman had 12 women working for her in and around the house. A crew of nine men worked the farm, although she said that during really busy harvest season she hired additional hands.

We visited the room in the house known as the family shrine, filled with statues of family deities. We were also served some of the most delicious tea and coffee of my life—very sweet and milky that was so good Starbucks was almost erased from my mind. We got settled into our bedrooms—12 were sleeping in one big, open room and eight slept in the guest house. The beds consisted of straw mats and blankets with the exception of two beds—by sheer luck I ended up with one of the beds.

The tour of the farm was amazing—sugarcane, cotton, coconuts, flowers, mango, and guava trees. One of the workers gave us a demonstration of how to climb the coconut trees and let the students try; it is so much harder than it looks.

After we finished our coconut milk, consumed straight from the coconut, we headed to a coconut processing factory.

I don’t know about you, but when I typically think of factories, I think of conveyor belts, warehouses, uniformity, concrete, and steal.

What we found instead was a large fire pit, a few machines used sparingly because of their electricity consumption, and employees engaged in hard, physical labor.

At the coconut factory, they were working on turning the skin of the coconut into rope, but the crew of nine made sure to conserve every part of the coconut—nothing was thrown out as the milk and meat of the coconut were used for food and the hulls were used to feed the fires necessary for the rope processing.


The operation at the sugar cane processing factory that we went to next was also similar in its effectiveness. We watched the male workers shred and “juice” the sugar cane by running the stalks through a “mashing” machine (yes, that’s the technical term) and then boil the juices that are excreted in the mashing process. Under the “shade” of a small shed, the juices were boiled in a huge vat, about the size of a small child’s plastic swimming pool. The dirt and debris was skimmed off the top with the help of huge fisherman-like nets. Then the male workers gathered to dump what had to be an extremely heavy vat of boiling sugarcane water using their bare hands.

After the contents of the vat solidified, the women, many with babies crawling nearby, formed the sugar into lumps the size of a grown man’s fist.
These lumps were later sold in the local villages.

Speaking of local villages, after a nap back at our generous host family’s home, we ventured to the local market. The market was a traveling market that consisted of a few tables, but even more “plots,” where merchants had set up their wares (clothing, produce, spices, toys) on large blankets. I took my time meandering and made purchases at two stalls. As I was leaving the market, a man came up to the student I was walking out with and held a camera in his hand. “Camera?” he asked in tentative English. I just picked it up and said, “Oh, thank you, that’s mine.” I hadn’t even realized I lost it!!! And the man was not someone I had purchased anything from; he must have been a proprietor whose stall I had just stopped to look at on my cook’s tour of the market. As a world traveler, the camera is obviously very important to me (and my sister, Lauren, since the camera is technically hers, but as a newspaper writer she understands that such incidents like this one are important for dramatic effect). However, that shiny little Cannon has even more potential for the man who found it given the paucity of flashy, electrical gadgets in that village or any other village within a large radius of Jayaramapuram. The man’s honesty was especially impressive not only because of the camera’s monetary value, but the anonymity of his find; I would have never known that he had it without him finding me. This gesture was just one of the many ways India showed me that class doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the number of rupees in your pocket. As many close friends and family members can attest, this incident also proves that you can take Alexis out of the country, but you can’t take the loser out of Alexis.

The entire time we were in Erode, we had a flexible schedule that allowed for us to nap, eat, drink, and be merry whenever such desires overtook the group. Our hosts were so gracious in opening their home and village to us that we were able to experience rural India in a way nobody who went to the Taj was able to do. Sitting in their courtyard we talked about favorite foods, arranged marriages, religion, fashion, and families. We enjoyed excellent meals served on banana leaves with water that our hosts had ordered especially for us so we would be spared the infamous Delhi belly. The following day, we visited several schools: one an elementary school for poor children, another school for students of all ages who were affected by polio, and a third which was an entire secondary school for wealthy boarding and day students. At the schools, people treated us like royalty.

We were paraded on stage in front of entire student body’s to hear their daily assembly, which included prayers, anti-poverty pledges, and student reports (including one extra special report on Abraham Lincoln—just for us).


We were given books and candy. At almost all of the schools we visited the children spoke better English than we did.

Each school put on a dance and musical performance for us.

In turn, our group had prepared an a capella rendition of “Stand By Me,” which we performed three different times. We were also asked to dance on stage to music the Indian students picked for us, which initially required a lot of prodding but then turned into a crazy, wonderful mess as we got over the fear of looking stupid and let loose. Oh, and did I mention that in the same day, we went to a carpet making factory,

a medicinal/homeopathic remedy factory, a temple

and were led in a one hour mediation that put most of our group to sleep (as any good meditation will do). And while the highlights of the trip are almost too numerous to mention, one of my favorite part of the entire trip was the evening drumming performance arranged for us by our host family. A group of village men came to the Jayaraman farm at about 10:30 PM in the evening that first night. They played their drums and danced with bells around their feet for a good ninety minutes and invited us to do the same. They set a fire and periodically dipped their drums into the flames to tune them. Since it was so dark, my pictures were not the best, but I hope you can get the idea. They also invited the entire group to join them in their dancing and we did. The drummers didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak their Indian dialect, but the sounds of the drums were all we needed to have a good time that night.


Needless to say, given all of the festivities, when we were back at the train station to catch the 10:30 PM Express train back to Chennai, we were exhausted. Half of us got our heart rates pumping when half of our group was mistakenly told by a tour guide to get on the incorrect train car. As the train whistled sounded, we went running the 150 or so yards through the station to make it onto the correct car. With the pack on my back, (not THE pack, but a pack) as trip leader I was the last one on the train. Freed of my rupees and utterly exhausted, the vibrating train cot could have been the heavenly bed at the Westin; I was out until the conductor woke me at 5 AM for our stop. Back in Chennai, I had the chance to go to Dr. Muhutsamy's daughter's home for the Navaratri Celebration, a nine night/ten day Hindu festival of dance and worship of celebrating nine forms of the female goddess Shakti (metaphor for the goddess Durga. Here is their family shrine.

I spent the rest of my time in Chennai was spent exploring the city with Paul, my partner in crime in Bangkok, and Lara, my former partner in crime in Tokyo (who had been absent from my last couple of trips since her husband had joined us temporarily on the voyage). Lara, who grew up in New Jersey, “went Jersey” on a couple of the electric rickshaw drivers who kept changing the price of our fares, but, for the most part, we made it around town okay.

In the few occasions where we did walk, we proved to be easy targets for beggars. There were young children carrying still younger children who pulled at our sleeves, pockets, and purses as we moved quickly through the city streets of Chennai, begging for whatever we would give. My hand clutching my ship husband Paul’s hand, we ducked into Chennai stores to avoid beggars only to have them waiting for us on the stairs when we departed. We were told not to give money because if we did we’d be mobbed. It was such a terrible feeling—we wanted to acknowledge that we saw these people, these children, these babies, but we had the privilege of resenting their intrusion on our sense of personal space and decorum. I’ll be thinking about those people and about what the principal at the private boarding school said to me as we were leaving for the train station. In preparation to go, I was complimenting him on the intelligence and graciousness of his students. I told him that many of our students hoped that they could one day return the favor offered to them by the students and serve as their hosts in America. To that, he chuckled and responded, “Go to America? Why would anybody want to go there?” Definitely something I’ll be thinking about as we make the long journey to Egypt.
I am so late getting this out that in only two days we’ll be in Alexandria. We have proceeded through the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aiden, and the Red Sea. The last two days we have gone especially fast at 32 knots (faster than any Semester at Sea ship has ever gone) due to pirate activity in the area. Apparently there have been increased attacks on cruise vessels, but I didn’t catch site of Johnny Depp impersonators. After the ship’s Halloween party tonight, we hit the Suez Canal at 2300. This long stretch at sea has brought with a touch of the plague/sinus infection and homesickness/friendsickness. Please know that I am so grateful to all of you for reading this blog and thinking of me from afar. Don’t forget that someone in the Red Sea is thinking of you, too, and if Verizon-in-Network calling stretched to the Suez Canal, I’d be bending all of your ears. Sadly, my voyage is more than halfway over; only five short weeks remain. Thank you all for giving me such good things to look forward to when I return to the US. And special thanks to my student, Jesse Einstein (pictured below) who shared some of his pictures with me for this blog entry!