[vimeo vimeo.com/3035602]

A week after the tragic attacks in Mumbai, we find Hyderabad quite calm, although there have been noticeable security changes, particularly in the hospital we live next to.  They now have very tight security in the entrance of both of their buildings, complete with metal detectors, extra guards, and one of the buildings has a phone you must call into before entering the building.  The assigned homework to Vijaynagar Colony was to either read a newspaper article or watch a segment on the news about the attacks, write about it, and also to write their own opinion or response.  Many students wrote that they thought the attacks were due to laziness from the Indian government, and that they were angry at their own government for not taking more preventative measures.

Due to exams and an unexpected holiday, we have been unable to get out to Nalgonda.  We are a little frustrated because their winter holiday is quite long as well, and as it is, we haven’t been able to have class for over a week.  However, we were able to move our schedule around with Vijaynagar Colony, and we will be able to get out to Nalgonda later this week and next weekend to make up for some missed classes.

The students at Vijaynagar Colony got some great investigative journalism practice this week, and I am quite sure we have some young reporters in the making.  Just to refresh your memory, they are producing short news stories, the two topics they have picked to cover are child labor, and street traffic.  Both topics are very pertinent to their communities here in Hyderabad.  Both groups explored the surrounding neighborhood in Vijaynagar Colony to find interviews for their stories.  The boys, working on the street traffic stories, conducted man-on-the-street interviews with auto-rickshaw drivers, and locals who walk on the streets.  They also were able to film some dramatizations crossing the chaotic streets to demonstrate just how difficult it is to get from point A to point B.  The girls were on the child labor story, and at first faced some roadblocks.  It was difficult to get to many of the children working in shops because the shop owners would always be there too.  We were harshly turned down and shooed away by many, which is understandable-I can see why none would be too willing to go on camera and talk about how they are exploiting children…Anyhow, the children that were allowed to interview with us, were the lucky ones who were allowed to attend school and were treated well by their shop owners.  While it was important to have these interviews to show different sides of the story, and I was glad to see that some of the children were happy, these interviews did not highlight the problem.  One of the girls has a friend who works in a shop down the street from the school.  Her shop owner does not allow her to attend school and treats her badly.  However, when we walked by the store, the owner was there and angrily told our group to leave.  Though at first discouraged, the girls finally relished the challenge and took a new angle, prompted by a clever idea from Dave.  Since they were unable to get any interviews, they instead just turned the camera on to film the first few minutes of each interaction, where they would introduce the project and ask the shop owners for permission to interview.  As expected, many of them angrily turned them away, and one shop owner even declared “there are no children working here!” while we saw several children working in their back kitchen.  This montage of rejections tells a lot on its own.  If they didn’t have anything to hide, they wouldn’t have such defensive responses.  We went handheld for these segments, so some of the camera work is quite shaky, but it will definitely have a gritty, raw aesthetic.

We are hoping to get a story about Prithvi posted soon, he has been a great help in the classroom, and we are so glad to have him with us in our Hyderabad classes.  He has been very busy preparing for the SAT’s, which are this weekend, so hopefully he will have more time after those are finished so we can share more about him on the blog.  The SAT was hard enough by itself, I can’t imagine having to take it in another language!  So we are wishing him the best of luck this weekend.

The girls were talking to me about coeducation the other day.  They mentioned that even though they attend a coeducational school, their teachers discourage the boys and girls from conversing with each other and still like to keep them separate.  This largely explains why the class tends to self-segregate itself by gender when we work in groups.  The girls complained that now they feel like they don’t know how to socialize or talk with boys, and they feel uncomfortable when they work with them.  The students here are obviously curious and have an innocent interest in the opposite sex. The girls especially love to point out different boys to me that they think are “cute” or “beautiful”.  Then the more curious ones like to drill me with questions about boyfriends and marriage, which I like to evade, or jokingly tell them that I’m married to Dave.  The toe ring that I wear just for fashion has brought me particular attention, because married women here wear toe rings.  However, when I shot the question back at the girls and asked if they had boyfriends, they scoffed at me like I was silly, and said “of course not”.  The boys at Nalgonda are similar in some ways.  They like to make offhand jokes about singing love songs to girls, and one boy has asked me for a lot of advice on a special birthday gift to give to a girl he knows at home.  When I asked this group about girlfriends, they gave me a similar reaction as that of the girls at Vijaynagar Colony and pretty much said, “of course not-DUHHH!”  We have definitely reached a point with our coed class at VIjaynagar in which it’s a space where everyone feels very relaxed and comfortable with each other.  Although they continue to choose to work with their own gender for projects, it’s very apparent that all of the students truly enjoy each other’s company.

The conversation I had with the girls earlier led me to think about the prominence of male comraderie here, which continues to strike me.  Heterosexual romantic displays of affection are not very common in most of the areas I have been, and are far outnumbered by the amount of males holding hands, draping their arms around each other, and just being very physically open with each other.  It is rather nice to have this openness, especially knowing that in some areas of the United States, this type of behavior might illicit not so nice comments from others.  Although from asking around, it seems that homosexuality is not something that many people are open with in this area.  My theory therefore (and feel free to let me know if I’m mistaken, I’d just like to learn more about this) is that since the culture doesn’t encourage as much interaction between males and females, many turn to their companions and friends for physical touch and this has led me to wonder about where sexual education stands in India. If students at some school are discouraged from even talking to the opposite sex, I have a feeling they probably aren’t learning much about sex education.  I know everyone eventually learns about this in their own way, shape, and form, but it seems like such a basic human thing that everyone should learn about, and they shouldn’t learn about it through the movies.  The students we work with may be too young, so perhaps they have more classes for this when they get get to 11th or 12th class.  I will ask Prithvi, our handy reference on schoollife about this.
Posted above, you will find video #1, “Dreams” from Vijaynagar Colony.   The students created a video based on Dave’s lesson plan, which allows the students to share about their lives, their interests, and their ambitions for the future through drawings and interviews.  Hope you enjoy, and next week we hope to bring you video #1 from Nalgonda, and an animated short about The Modern Story propelled by my late night fits of insomnia.