Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress and he still seems to be a frontman for whatever WordPress does.
I was at an event he arranged on June 3. Matt looked like a typical America who, as Nandan would say, gave very little attention to his personal appearance other than hygiene. About 40 people came to the bar and we had a room which was kind of separated from other rooms in the bar but it was not private. When Matt finished his beer he walked to the bar and got another one for himself instead of having anyone get it for him, and despite the fact that he was obviously the center of conversation.
He advertised the event through a local WordPress meetup group. This group is an unregistered organization of people who meet at a coffeeshop or bar once a month and talk about WordPress. No one gets paid to organize the event; it is just people helping other people. Many of the people who go do WordPress for their job so it is in their interest to learn WordPress among themselves. Also, there is a culture here of students getting together and teaching each other for free without paying a teacher to be in front of everyone.
Matt chose to approach this group to organize his meeting because these were people who were interested in talking about WordPress for their own personal benefit and not because someone told them to talk about WordPress.
The success of this kind of event made me wonder why such events do not happen in Varanasi. Of course they do not start with leading figures for a topic – they start with an interested community base, and that attracts special speakers. I am not sure what issues Varanasi people care about, but there must be something that people want to learn and would be willing to learn without being paid to learn it. This is the kind of group which I would want to assemble, and which foreign students would like to meet.
I personally go to groups like this for many computer issues, to play sports, for HIV and gay rights issues, and for lots of other events.
Both Nandan and Babu have told me that this system is difficult to manage in India. It is still hard for me to understand why but I want to come to understand.
I arrived in Seattle on the night of Friday May 13.
The weather is wonderful here and I love my city. I find that my life is not so different here as it was in India. I work in front of a computer for part of the day and play for another part. Every day I have some kind of appointment to meet someone. I spend some time studying and helping someone else with their studies.
I really would like to be able to travel back and forth for work between Varanasi and Seattle every year, and also have money to take a vacation to somewhere else every year. I told Nandan that I would apply for some jobs in Varanasi through American organizations but I need to finish some web stuff first so that I can pitch my portfolio. I need a couple of months to sort this out.
On Wednesday May 11 we hosted a conference about HIV vaccination in Varanasi. The below is a video from the event, but I have it set to start at a theater and music portion of the event as most of the presentation is in Hindi.
I got a notice about an HIV vaccine conference funding opportunity and suggested to Nandan, Ravi, and Babu that we all apply for the funding.
We got the grant. It was for USD $1000 and we had to organize a conference to commemorate HIV Vaccine Awareness Day on May 18. We did our conference on May 11, which was the day before I was scheduled to leave India and the last acceptable day by the grant guidelines to put the event within a week of the actual day.
We first talked to some speakers who would be in a panel for the event. We eventually selected a director from Benares Network of Positive People, a BHU law professor who did research in HIV discrimination law, a Sampurnanand professor who researches the culture of masculinity and its relationship with women’s rights, and me as someone who knows a little about HIV vaccination. We had a microbiology graduate student drop in from Australia and she also spoke a little at the event.
In addition to this Father Anand arranged for his theatre troupe to do a skit about HIV in front of the audience. I was really pleased with their performance and find him to be the most organized, honest, and efficient NGO director in Varanasi. I really look forward to working more with him because he seems to want my support and I absolutely need his because he knows the city organizational sector like no one else.
Before the event Ravi and I personally visited about 20 NGO offices to invite them and check them out. We took interviews of staff members to find out what the NGO does and get their contact information. Father Anand had already created a base for this by publishing such a list in Hindi which had a name of the organization and a contact number, but we needed something more detailed and in English. We translated the list and called every organization and visited as many as we had time to visit. We plan to polish both the Hindi and English version and publish it and distribute it freely both online and in print.
It was difficult to get much information of HIV vaccination out because the community base has very little background in HIV and not much more understanding of what a vaccine is. However, this has to change. IAVI recently announced a partnership with Indian government whereby they will expand HIV vaccination trials.
Nandan and Ravi put together the report to the sponsor. I was thrilled that what they wrote was better than any report which I could have written. It really makes me proud to think that I am working with people who are non-native English speakers who can write technical papers better than I can. I proofread what they wrote and their grammar mistakes were minimal. I feel really good about doing more of this kind of work in the future.
I met Father Anand for the first time on April 16, Palm Sunday. Ravi and I went to the Catholic church to talk to him and watch this play they were organizing to teach the story of Easter.
There were strange things about the service as compared to other Catholic services and I wondered what was up. After the service Father Anand told me what was up – they arranged for the priest to do the welcome and goodbye, protestants did the sermon and music, and Hindus and Muslims played all the roles in the theater show.
Later before this HIV vaccine conference we arranged I went to meet him again at his office. Everything he showed me there impressed me. He does the church work, and he manages a troupe of street play performers, and he does videography for simple documentaries and a TV channel. Besides that, he runs an organized office.
Their videography company is called Vishwa Jyoti Communications. I look forward to working more with him in the future.
Sarukh and Abdul arrived the week I was going to leave and I was very happy to see them. Nandan’s father had a problem with Sarukh because he did not have legal ID, so I suggested that I would put them in a hotel. Nandan’s father wanted me to stay inside the house because he did not want me to feel pressure about the two needing to leave, so I told him I would and then every night everyone conspired to get me out of the house without him knowing. It was more of a polite gesture not to talk about the trouble. In this case the problem was that everyone in every guesthouse has to have identification to stay there, and the concern is preventing terrorism. Nandan and family did not pay much in bribes to register the guesthouse so they have to follow the law to the cultural standard.
Sarukh, me, and Abdul
I met them every day and we had a lot of fun. Being with them both and Sarukh in particular was definitely one the highlights to my trip to India – I was pretty smitten with Sarukh. We went to the typical tourist sites like the Kashi Vishwanath and took a boat ride and walked the alleys. Before they left we went to Nandlal Master’s group wedding of about 50 couples, and they both enjoyed that and got to flip urban attitude secretly to me over how the rural people marry at age 15. They also complained continually about Benares being dirty. Nandan says that Kolkata is extra dirty, and it is true that the diesel taxis there do thicken the air, but Benares does have an awful lot of human and animal corpses everywhere so I guess the debate could be settled by determining whether smoke or rotting fumes are more unpleasant.
Here is a video from that group wedding we attended.
I was preparing hard for the HIV vaccine conference at this time so I typically left Abdul and Sarukh alone during the day and only visited them in the mornings and stayed the night with them. I told them both to write me after they go and I told Sarukh to get an ID and for Abdul to meet up with the Dum Dum Society and get his wife and baby HIV tested so that he could get regular HIV treatment. We talked about NGO work and tourism every day and I appreciated that they had a lot of questions for me.
Sarukh laughs and jokes a lot. After they had been in a few days I transferred them to a better hotel room and when we were there Sarukh put on some music channel and started singing the words to every song. He had a gumcha, which the thin cloth that India people use as a travel towel, head covering, and for probably other things. He started wearing this orange gumcha to look like the people in the music videos, and doing dance along with it. At first he did male roles, then he did female roles, and then he turned it into a strip tease. He continually took off his clothes and then after more than an hour he was finally nude and the whole experience was one of the hottest things in which I have ever participated.
Abdul was not engrossed like I was but he tolerated it well. Having him around made me feel a lot more safe with Sarukh, because I felt like he was safer in Benares not coming alone and I was safer because I was also establishing a friendship with one of his friends, so conversation among us was a lot more fluid.
Nandan never trusted Sarukh and told me to be careful around him. There are a lot of factors at play here but I appreciate that Nandan supported my interest in them. Among the reasons Nandan did not like him are the following: his lower class standing, lack of education, his job is to sell things to foreigners.
Kris sends supplies from New Zealand but Nandan has to periodically photograph boys who receive them for promos
There was also an issue with some money being missing from my room. Nandan hired this guy to come install an air conditioner. I found the guy in my room checking the room out by himself, and in India as anywhere else it is a cultural taboo to enter someone’s bedroom unescorted. I cannot prove anything, but I think he took my money sitting out, about $40. Nandan said that Sarukh took it, and that I am mistaken about when the guy was in my room, which could be the case because I am generally confused. Both options are unpleasant, and I certainly do not understand Kolkata street kid psychology, but despite Sarukh working in an profession which typically involves never seeing clients a second time I never believed that he would touch my money. The loss did not matter to me; I told Sarukh what was up. He denied anything and dropped the issue after I told him that I took his side completely, which was my most reasonable option regardless of what I might have believed. Nandan said that he had cleaned my room before the guy arrived on that day, but in any case, this incident should color both my and Nandan’s relationship with Sarukh in the future, should I stay in touch with him as I would like to do.
Sarukh works a manufacturing job, but his interest in culture and community would make him good for more intellectual jobs if he wanted them, and I think the world would be a better place with someone bright and polite like him in a more social position.
I have been trying to learn some Bengali sign language and it has been fun for me to try to communicate with Abdul. I feel bad about regional sign languages; they seem like languages with little history or cultural attachment and I get this idea in my hide that there should be a big international council where everyone who is deaf should come together and learn a universal language for all the abstract words which are communicated with abstract gestures so that much of sign language could be the same anywhere, and perhaps signing could become a diplomatic international language. Bengali sign language is supposed to be different from sign language elsewhere in India, plus is is still fairly new.
Abdul is illiterate. I have read online that the large majority of deaf people get almost no education, and almost all of them are illiterate. It might be this way everywhere in the world if it happens in such an educated developing city as Kolkata. I have no idea what can be done for the education of such people. Should they learn to read their local language? Should they just start with English to improve their job prospects and give them internet, since they are mute and cannot read lips anyway?
Nandan knows some people in the Bengali sign language NGO community. Apparently there are more foreigners promoting community in the Bengali sign language community than there are Bengalis, as Abdul knew two NGOs which are not the NGO with which Nandan had worked, and both of them were run by foreign people.
Sarukh is illiterate also. I am not sure what to think about this. It seems strange to me that he is like Mark; a person who speaks good English but cannot read or write anything. Both of those guys know English and two Indian languages. How does that happen?
So Nandan and I went to Kolkata to retrieve that 250kg of books I sent there from Seattle back in January. It arrived March 3 but no one contacted us or became aware of its arrival. I had the American shipper track it and he found in it Kolkata. We hired a customs house agent who told us to come to Kolkata and sign some documents, so we went to Kolkata. We sorted that and the people we hired seemed cool, but let’s wait and see how the books arrive in Benares.
Nandan is very lazy. He sleeps like 9 hours a night, and sometimes lounges around in bed for an hour after he wakes reading the paper or watching TV or drinking chai or making phone calls.
I sleep about 7 hours a night so in the mornings when we are out of town and I am away from my office what I can do except wake up and leave the hotel and explore the streets?
I went out and I saw these two guys speaking in sign language while they were walking down the street. I give one of them the cruising look and he gives me the maybe look so I go talk to them. As it turned out, Abdul was deaf and he had been friends with Sarukh for about five years, so Sarukh also knows good sign language now. Sarukh spoke good English and it was apparent to me that he had spent a lot of time with foreign tourists because he did not have the grammar problems which students who learn English in school have.
They invited me to tea and we talked about HIV issues and Abdul told me he was positive and both of them had a certain amount of HIV education because this was a personal issue for them. We talked about a lot of things then they took me to this gym in the middle of this field where lots of boys were playing cricket. They had this guy open the door to a back room and then he locked us in there and that was really weird but we just chilled and talked for a few hours. Abdul showed me a letter that someone foreign had written to him saying how much fun they had hanging out. We kissed and hugged a little and I made out with Sarukh and then I left but told them I would see them the next day.
And the next day we did go out and have adventures. After the adventures were over I asked them if they would come visit me in Varanasi and they said yes. I gave them train fare. Nandan said I was crazy because they would take the money and run, or come to Varanasi expecting more money. I am not sure what to think. They obviously did not have much money, but they were a lot of fun and a lot about both of them interests me. The train fare meant nothing to me because it was a small amount and because I wanted them to come visit me anyway, and it seemed like a good idea for me to have fun relaxing company in Benares.
I guess I will see what happens if or when they arrive.
This video has nothing to do with those two, but it is one of several which Nandan made in Kolkata. Others are on his YouTube page.
I went out the next day with Nandan and we Sarukh and Abdul and they said they would show us around Kolkata. They pointed out different things and played frisbee in a park on our way to the Victoria Memorial, which was easily the best-presented museum I have yet seen in India due to the pieces on display being well-selected and having good explanations about why they were being shown and how they relate to the other places. It was a trip being somewhere that felt so British. A little thing which stood out to me was that there was a frieze on the outside to the left of the main door showing some British people signing some documents at a table. To me, this seems like a great subject for commemorative art, but I knew Nandan would find it odd and he did. It was a great illustration of the importance which my culture places on contractual agreements and another way to solidly hit home to both Nandan and me why Indians and Westerners often have problems.
There was another cultural clash there. Unfortunately I have no picture because Nandan was learning how to use the focus on his camera, and the pictures he took were not clear. There were these putti faces in bronze on marble everywhere – search for “Victoria Memorial cherub” to see pictures. These had recently been painted flat black for some reason. If anyone had intent to preserve the British style, this was a bad attempt at site maintenance because the polished metal look is necessary. But worse that that, the person hired to paint the metal was a typical day laborer, and this person took no care not to splash paint on the marble or on the edge where the bronze met the metal. There were full brushstrokes on the marble which I am sure were intended only to cover the sides of the bronze, and because Indian housepainters habitually use no painters tape or take any care to have a sharp divide between what gets painted and what does not. Nandan’s house has the same problem in places.
Amit came to my place early this morning. This was about the fifth time he visited. He is cute and I like having him around.
I am not really sure of what to think of this culturally and Nandan does not know either, but when he came today he brought his troll with him and wanted me to meet the guy. Amit speaks no English and his troll’s English was not as good as my Hindi, so the conversation was limited but I am glad to say that we both got to ask and answer some questions.
Amit is about 20 and he has been with his keeper since 9th class, so that could be anytime between age 13-15. This older guy was mid-40s and was his school teacher, and now apparently does some kind of administration at some kind of college. The troll asked me for sex and I turned him down because he was disgusting. I started asking some questions about sexuality.
We did not have any conversations I had not already had many times before with others, so nothing surprised me. But even though I expected him to bring this up, his incredulity that I could be happily unmarried and with no intention to marry a female seemed strange to me in this new context considering who he was, who Amit is, and what I expected he must have already known about me as a foreigner. He also asked me about my family situation by way of suggesting that I had money through my father, because of course in Indian society it is unthinkable that anyone my age could have financial independence. He asked me if I made a specific amount of money. I think this was the first time anyone tried to guess my income instead of asking outright, and he guessed a number which was very high by local standards and below the poverty line by the standards in my city. I told him the reality and I as always I also told him that my American affords little more than my simple lifestyle, but even though he understood my words I am sure he could not understand the concept of money having different purchasing power in different economies.
Amit is doing a dance performance on April 20 at Assi Ghat and he wanted to do his makeup here because he lives far from Assi Ghat and I am so close. I also invited them both to the May 11 HIV Vaccine Day event and they said that they would come.
Amit showed me a picture which he and Poona (his hijra friend) had taken at some kind of formal event where they were looking like boyfriend and girlfriend. I would like to become better friends with them both, and also I am concerned about their education. I talked to Nandan about this and he said that if he interviewed Amit then probably that would explain a lot about the status of gay people in India, and I agree. Also since Chance India is managing English classes then perhaps we can somehow pool resources. I think I can manage the teachers for the MSM kids, but at this time it seems like the process could be more efficient if also there were other groups taking English tutoring.
Josh had written me in 2008 asking about Nandan, and Nandan had told me about his visit then saying that he was a fun guy.
Josh is a musician. He plays percussion and seems to make music everywhere he goes. He brought this dancer named Penelope with him and together one would start making some noise and then the other would and the end result was that they started a parade every time they walked down the street with both singing, Josh beating something, Penelope dancing, and whatever kids were around following them.
Josh’s plan is to travel between America and India teaching music. He wants to live in both countries at different parts of the year touring schools and giving music presentations. He integrates music into other kinds of studies, like playing a song and showing the country where it originated or talking about different cultures. I went with him to several schools and he has a stage presence which makes the kids pay attention for sure, and undoubtedly the kids in these classes here are not accustomed to getting foreign visitors who do presentations like this.
Josh has some problems. He has no bookkeeper and he is his own webmaster and publicist, and despite him being able to do these things adequately, he is a musician and ought not be bothered with details like this. I think Josh would benefit from having some organization in both India and America arrange his bookings and promote him perhaps along with other touring teachers, so that when a school is open to receiving a guest like this then the agency could send one out. I also think that people would fund an agency which provided such a service, because the costs of managing performances like this can drop really low if one agency is handling multiple people with various teaching talents. Josh and Penelope do music together; perhaps someone else could go do science, someone else could promote healthcare study, someone else could talk about business. I really feel like kids need to meet role models who can talk about applying their academic studies to something practical or to encourage extracurricular study.
Josh’s website is WorldThroughMusic.org. I would love to be able to work with him in the future. I am going to have to think about how I can help get funding for him and others like him. Josh and I get along really well. I am not sure if Penelope is down for a commitment to India, but she is definitely a fantastic sport about getting sick and being hassled by Indian culture.
Josh performed once at an especially welcoming organization – Duniya. This is a school for poor children in Nagwa, in the illegal neighborhood near Assi. It is funded by some Dutch people and the staff there seem like helpful people and gave us a lot of attention when we went to talk to them about organizing local NGOs to work together.
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