2014-08-07-Discovering Enchanting India
Seminars@Hadley
Discovering Enchanting India:
A Unique Experience
Presented by
Dr. Rod Moag
Vileen Shah
Julie Kay
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
August 7, 2014
Host
You’re listening to Seminars @ Hadley. This seminar is “Discovering Enchanting India: A Unique Experience,” presented by Dr. Rod Moag, Vileen Shah and Julie Kay; moderated by Larry Muffett.
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars @ Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley’s Seminars Team and I also work in Curricular Affairs. Today’s seminar topic is “Discovering Enchanting India: A Unique Experience.”
Our presenters today are Dr. Rod Moag, Vileen Shah and Julie Kay. Dr. Moag is Professor Emeritus in Indian Languages at the University of Texas. Vileen is a native of India and both he and Julie are veteran Hadley instructors.
Today our presenters will be sharing some insights with you on the fascinating geography, culture and people of India.
Now I believe Julie is going to start so let me welcome Julie and begin our seminar.
Julie Kay
Thank you, Larry. I’m very excited to be here. When I was a little girl my favorite book was The Little Princess and it starts out with Sarah Crew living in India, and she was a little girl. That was my first introduction to the mysteries and the beauty that is portrayed in India in so many ways.
So I am the World History instructor and I’m a lover of geography as anyone will tell you, and the high school program is really pushing the concept of us all learning more about geography. So if you look at the globe and you consider it like an orange, and you divide it in half; and you take one of the halves, and on one side of the orange you have North America and the very top of South America, if you go literally halfway around the world you will then find India is at the same kind of parallel as Central America. So it’s really close to Ecuador, at least the bottom tip of it. The shape of India is kind of like a diamond shape, so like a square that is set on point.
It’s a very large country. It extends to the Indian Ocean and it’s a land of great contrasts in geography. The barren, snowcapped Himalaya which is the world’s largest mountain system rises along the northern border. South of the Himalaya is the low, fertile Ganges plain and it’s India’s most populous region. The Great Indian Desert lies in the west but eastern India receives some of the highest rainfall in the world during the monsoon season from June to October.
India is second only to China in country population but India is growing faster by some 17 million a year and may surpass China by 2030. Although 81% of the people are Hindu India also has more than 138 million Muslims, one of the world’s largest Muslim populations. So I think that’s personally very fascinating.
Countries surrounding India are Pakistan to the west and above that to the north is Afghanistan. Then to the northeast is Nepal, which is very small and it kind of cuts into India; and then further to the northeast is Asia. And to the west is Bangladesh. To the southeast you have the Bay of Bengal and to the southwest you have the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka is directly to the south and it’s an island to the south. So I hope that helps you get a feeling of where India is at and a little bit about its climate.
So I don’t want to take much time because both Dr. Moag and Vileen have so much information for you. I do want to refer you to the resource list that we have compiled for you and it’s really an exciting one. A lot of people contributed to this one. So if you want to know more about India go to the resource list. We have a list of movies, non-fiction books, books, TV shows and travel agencies for you to review, so I hope you’ll enjoy that.
So I’m going to hand the mic over to Vileen.
Vileen Shah
Thank you, Julie! Thank you, Larry, for moderating this session. Hello everybody, good morning. I’m Vileen Shah, Instructor at the Hadley School. I’ve been working for Hadley since 2001. I am from India although I’m an American citizen, a citizen of the United States. Back in India I was working as a Professor of Political Science at the University of Bombay. I have a lot to share about India with you. I was raised as a child. I lived there as an adult and now I’m here so maybe I can connect to both.
Friends, I’ll first tell you our today’s brief plan and then tell you more about India’s culture, social life and the political system. Briefly I’m going to talk for about ten minutes and then I’ll let our guest speaker, Professor Rod Moag, to tell you more about attractions in India and he will tell you about his experience in India as well. And he will speak for about fifteen minutes. So you will have a chance for asking lots of questions. I would like to devote more time for the question and answer session and that will be for approximately half an hour.
Alright, so let’s see. First of all I would like to give you some statistics before I take you over to India without paying a penny. We can all fly together but first let’s know who all are going there and what’s about the tourism in India. The tourism industry in India has been fast-growing. According to the statistics available from the International Travel and Tourism Council approximately 6.29 million people visited India in 2012.
Approximately ₨ 6.4 trillion were earned from this industry. A Rupee is Indian currency and it translates into dollar, so ₨ 6.4 trillion is equal to $100 billion. So it’s a $100 billion industry growing rapidly at the rate of 8% or 9% every year so it’s going to be really a big tourism industry in India.
Approximately 7% of the GDP comes from tourism and 39.5 million people get jobs from this industry. Well, you will be interested in knowing that approximately 16% of the tourists in India are from the United States as against 12% from the United Kingdom or what you can call England. So let’s see whether it is worth going to India.
You don’t want to go because 6.29 million people went there, but because you learned something that you found fascinating therefore you may want to go. I read in one of the articles long back in some geography articles that if a scientist is able to make a rod of the size of diameter and if you push it into the planet, the other end of the rod will appear in India. What I’m trying to say is that India is right on the other side of the planet where the United States is.
We do not need this rod and I don’t think that’s a possibility in the near future, but I do think that there is a thread connecting India and the United States. India is the largest democracy in the world today as the United States is the oldest democracy with a written Constitution. As you know and most of you must be aware that India was a British colony ruled by the British people, and after 1947 when India became independent many other colonies became independent. But they all tried and failed in democracy; India has sustained that.
So there in India if you live there you are able to exercise all freedoms that you are enjoying here – freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of religion and many more. But the freedom of religion has a different connotation in India. India has never had anything called religious persecution. There may be some recent riots in the name of religion but that was more politicized. However, there has never been any persecution that became the political authority, the dictator or the head of the church or anybody prosecuting people not following their religion; and therefore you find today that almost all denominations of all religions of the world exist in India.
St. Thomas, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, went to India in the First Century and preached Christianity, so Christians have been there since the First Century. But I will not take your time in telling you the history. I would rather tell you what’s religion for people in India today. They have a wide approach to religion and you will not be surprised, if you are in India on the 25th of December you will see that the two Hindus are wishing each other “Merry Christmas.” They do not go to church but they do wish each other “Merry Christmas.” And supposing you are not from the faith of Christianity, and if you’re visiting India people will wish you too “Merry Christmas” because they do not see any harm in wishing.
The social aspect of all religions and sharing with each other, and wishing each other and greeting each other, and it is also open. People openly ask you what your religion is because they are saying that there is no problem, you are not going to be persecuted. So once again if you’re a tourist please be prepared to answer that question. People may ask you what your religion is, what your faith is, do you go to church every Sunday. So don’t feel offended.
Alright, taking that further, in addition to religion India’s social life as is known to many people, it was originally based on the caste system as far as the Hindus are concerned, but the caste system is almost fading away. India is getting much more modern now and new classes, economic classes have come up so like in any other country you find in India the rich, the middle, and the poor classes. Of course nearly one-third of the population is still poor.
India has been working hard to become a strong economy but it is no longer what you call a third-world country as is known to much of the Western world. It is now called an emerging economy. It is fast-growing and it has all the features of modernization like high-rises and developed industries and factories, and a software industry. Some of you might be aware that India has made its name in the software area.
So there are lots of things. In fact, India has been a contributor of many innovations to the world of knowledge. Zero is the invention made in India. The Arabic numbers, numerals as you know, are actually the Indian numbers using zero which was used in India for nearly 7000 years. In terms of astronomy also the Indian accounts of stars and planets, although 7000 years old match well with the NASA records today. And Yoga, something everyone’s so fond of here in the United States, is originally from India.
Well friends, as I said the social life is different there but it’s not so different. You will find lots of people able to speak English. English is taught in almost every Indian school and many schools teach English right from the first grade. So you will not have the problem of communicating. Of course there’ll be an accent as I have and there will be some different pronunciations but you will be able to deal with it.
Overall India has a vast cultural heritage, rich natural beauty – mountains and rivers as Julie described; and therefore it attracts many tourists. The tourism as we understand is just not people who are visiting to see India but it is also in the form of medical tourism which means lots of people go to take treatment in India. The India service in terms of medical surgery and all is so affordable. Something, you know, I was listening to a radio that said that someone had to undergo surgery and the estimated expense was $45,000. But then he was sent to India and he could do it for $10,000.
So there are many people that go there for medical treatment, medical tourism; there’s religious tourism, sport tourism and educational tourism in addition to the cultural tourism. There are many attractions in India and I will definitely let Professor Moag tell you [about them]. Professor Moag has a PhD in linguistics, has a Master’s degree in Indian Studies. He went to India as part of the Peace Corps. He learned Hindi which is the major Indian language; he also learned another south Indian language. He taught Indian languages here in the United States so he has an expansive experience of being in India and being close to the Indian culture by teaching the Indian language here at the University of Texas and I think some other universities that he will tell you.
So this is in brief about India but I’ll be open to your questions afterwards. I will now let Professor Moag talk to you but before that I would like to give you a little glimpse of some Indian languages. By the way, there are 16 Indian languages officially recognized in the Constitution and nearly 1000 dialects. But I’ll speak to him in Hindi, which is a major language.
[Speaks Hindi] Now I asked him, I greeted him with the word “Namaste” which is equivalent to “Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.” At any time you can simply say “Namaste” and then I asked him “How are you?” So he’s going to answer my question in Hindi. Let’s hear him.
Dr. Rod Moag
[Speaks Hindi]
Vileen Shah
So he answered that he is very fine and then he asked me “How are your enemies feeling?” And I think my enemies are feeling depressed because I always keep a smiling face and that’s one of the ways to keep your enemies depressed. Anyway, I will just ask one more question and then I will not be between you and Professor Moag. Professor Moag, [speaks Hindi].
Dr. Rod Moag
[Speaks Hindi]
Vileen Shah
Terrific! I’ll briefly translate. Professor Moag said that he will be going out for lunch with some of his friends and then he said that some person is going to see him because he needs him for that, and that’s his plan for Saturday. I did not translate what I asked him, I probably forgot – I asked him what was his plan on this Saturday and that’s what he said, that he is going out for lunch and that he is going to see someone at home. Alright, thank you everybody for your patience listening, and here’s Professor Moag who will tell you about attractions in India. Over to Professor Moag,
Dr. Rod Moag
Well thank you, Professor Shah, and good morning and welcome to all of you tuned in so to speak for our seminar this morning. You’ve had a very good orientation to India from several perspectives from both Julie and Professor Shah, and now I’ll tell you a little bit about how I became involved with India.
My travel to India spans a period of 44 years, from 1962 when I first went there as a Fulbright student and my last trip over was in 2008 when I was the keynote speaker at a conference on religions. I’m not a religious leader but I was invited to give the keynote speech at this conference in Trivandrum which is in south India, specifically in the states of Kerala where the language I taught at the University of Texas is spoken. Malayalam is spoken by some 35 million people, one of the smaller official languages of India and it’ spoken in the state of Kerala. And I’ve been involved with Malayalam since 1965 and I wrote textbook that’s used at various universities in the US and other Western countries.
But to go back a little bit, when I was an undergraduate I came into the dining hall one day and we had to go through a line and have our meal tickets punched. The ticket puncher had an accent that I had never heard before, and I said “Hey, where are you from?” He said “India,” and so I stepped out of line and forgot about my meal ticket for a while and I plied that poor guy with questions for about an hour. But we became very good friends. He was one of a number of graduate students that worked as ticket punchers in that particular dining hall and so I started to hang out with these guys, and used to visit their apartments and they taught me how to make chicken curry and some other things.
Well, this sparked my informal introduction to India and some aspects of Indian culture. And then in my senior year they came out with some fellowships for studying what was called “exotic” languages – that basically met non-Western/European languages. And so I applied for a fellowship to study Hindi at the University of Wisconsin, and in 1961 in the fall I went out and began graduate study there, taking Hindi and other classes. And about a month into the Hindi course I realized that I wasn’t really going to learn the language well until I met it on its own turf, so I applied for a Fulbright student grant to go to India.
And in 1962 I landed in Bombay with a group of Fulbright students and I spent two years in India that time. The first year I was sent to Lucknow University, a famous university on the Gangetic Plain of north India that Julie mentioned and there I lived in a student hostel. And I made a bunch of friends there and interacted, you know, had a good taste of Indian student life. And the second year I stayed on as an English tutor and I was sent along with three other Americans to the Patna University which is in Bihar state, which is in eastern India still, and I lived right along the Ganges River. And in the early morning I could hear a Sadhu or holy man walking with his wooden shoes through our courtyard to go down and bathe in the River Ganges.