Glenda and Her Munchkins

In Deb and my first joint volunteer activity with Novartis, a group of 20 Novartis employees from Hyderabad calling themselves Jawaharlal took about 100 students from a government school (ages 8 to 10) to the Nehru Zoo. The students are from low income families and the government sponsors their education which includes clothing, food, and supplies. You find the roses among the thorns in this environment. Now, most of Deb’s travels have been between the hotel and HiTec City. With the exception of the occasional tent communities, the area is pretty much a suburban sprawl on steroids. But today, we traveled through some of the hard-working underbelly of Hyderabad. This is not the quaint-but-jammed Old City with its ancient markets that hustle and bustle with about a million people shoulder to shoulder moving in this seemly well choreographed ballet of rickshaws, motorcycles, bicycles, tricycles and burqas. This is the heavy truck repair yards with huge diesel motors suspended by hoists in the space between the buildings and the roads. There is mud all around, men are pounding on the engine that looks like a steel heart that’s been ripped from some giant robot’s body; the aortic arteries and veins still dangling from the organ. Next to it is a shop with men carving on a piece of wood lying on the cement floor of the building, the entire space open to the road. This is NOT what you'd describe as Norm Abram’s New Yankee Workshop.
We follow a road in a northy-westy-southy-easty direction that has a recently-built “fly over”, a limited access elevated road, that serpentines through these working neighborhoods. The Chai and banana cart peddlers move slowly along the roadside. If there is an Indian poet like Carl Sandburg, then he’s written about these people. Old tyres (it’s their spelling, not mine) lay in huge mounds in front of various repair businesses. The piles mimic the rock formations that tower behind them so the tyres are covered in litter as well. My gym rat buddy Mark Van Orten and his dad from Morristown, NJ would be the shining light to the bulk of the repair stations who service all kinds of vehicles in the open. If you recall in one of my first posts when we arrived in Hyderabad late at night, I noticed the familiar scenes that loomed out of the darkness at me. In the light of day, I believe I could be back In Barquisimeto or Sao Paulo, or Manila, or Bangkok. The banging of large hammers on thick metal altogether make up something akin to the rhythms of the Kodo drummers in Japan. And while the store fronts may look as disheveled and decrepit as the rows of stores along Michigan Avenue or 8 Mile Road in Detroit, there is actually legitimate commerce that goes on here. There are no significant barriers to any entrepreneur fulfilling their dreams. And that is what gives Hyderabad its vitality.
Finally arriving at the Zoo, which touts itself as the largest in India (though the zoo in Kolkata makes the same claim), we pile out of our 10 seater winger (a Mercedes transport that made the Mietwagen M-B 190 in Germany look luxurious)
and meet the other team members who were just arriving as well. Our first task was to make up snacks for each of the groups our team members would be chaperoning. Our team leader had the bags and boxes of goods hauled out and within a minute or two, an assembly process got the bags organized and we set off to find our charges. It reminded me of the many Saturday mornings Deb and I were responsible for the snacks for a soccer or T-ball or gymnastics event. Each adult got a 1-liter bottle of water and that was a thankful provision.

Each team was responsible for 10 children. Some teams got a teacher as well. Deb and I were teamed up with Reena and her niece who was a great addition as she was 13 and the kids really did follow her. We were teamed with Reena because she spoke Telugu. Some of the Novartis people are from other states and Telugu is a regional language. Any of my colleagues who traveled with me to Venezuela can attest to the differences in the Spanish language spoken in rural Venezuela versus any other city that purports to be civilized might speak. Thus we were all arranged so that some of us had a clue as to what was being said. We set off on our safari with our kids. Now the school gives the kids uniforms. Most of the girls wore blue jumpers with a white blouse. The boys wore white shirts with either blue shorts or pants. Most ever kid wore some kind of flip flop.
The evening before, Deb and I wrote out questions to ask the kids about the animals to make the event a series of teachable moments. Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself. Besides, Deb and I had a series of our own teachable moments during the excursion. The kids did have animals they really wanted to see: first of these was the tiger, then the elephants. There was one white Bengal Tiger. He did actually look somewhat majestic, sitting rather regally at the edge of his island. There are plenty of signs telling visitors not to taunt or throw rocks at the animals. I’m cool with that. As we left the white tiger’s area, we heard him roar several times as the sound carried quite a distance. It was enough to get a yellow tiger in a distant island to get up and cruise around marking his territory. He was either doing that or, as he was my equivalent age, he just got up from a nap and had to do what most old guys have to do with which I can identify, but I’m pretty sure he was doing his cat thing.
After about 45 minutes on the trek, we stopped at what appeared to be a picnic area. We handed out the snacks and juice bottles. The kids sat on the grass and chatted among themselves. I wasn’t quite sure if they were planning the modern equivalent of the Sepoy Mutiny, but as they were laughing and asking Deb if they could kiss her on the cheek, my worries were unfounded. Deb was as much of an attraction while she was there as most of the animals. I first noticed this when a group of Muslim women stampeded across a median between two exhibits and were staring at Deb. Then there were groups of young women who were all too casually strolling next to us and one would run ahead to take a picture of her friends who were moving close enough so that Deb would be in the picture with them. She was stopped by groups and asked to have their picture taken with her. I believe they thought it must have been Madonna with some of her adopted kids on an outing; no, not that kind of outing. But one group of young men asked if they could take their picture with both Deb and I.
Now by the time we saw the elephants, three tethered in their pavilions and one out in the paddock, the kids were starting to get tired. But they still wanted to see the birds and then go on the train ride that circled the zoo. Whenever the train passed, the passengers would be waving and greeting everyone along the way, so our little gang thought that would be fun. As the kids fatigued, our efforts to contain them became an exercise in herding cats.

One of the animals the kids did perk up for was the giraffe, and I do mean that in the singular. He was enjoying his afternoon grazing among the trees in his paddock. He did show some of that gracefulness you see in the nature documentaries on giraffes, but then you realize they are social animals so his singularity is disheartening. But then again, most of the exhibits have only one specimen. This was particularly said for the one chimpanzee who sat looking rather forlorn on his island. There were a couple of sacred baboons, one male with one female. The male did come over to see us out of curiosity. Deb thought he saw me as a threat. Get outta here, ya big baboon! George, George, George of the Jungle, watch out for that tree! Well we finally got the roundup to the train station that was every bit of the image of some remote Indian village station in miniature. There were vendors nearby, it was dusty, the train was ancient and decrepit, and the tracks, I had noted, went over some bridges that appeared to lack adequate support. But throwing caution to the wind, we piled our troop on board. The last car was filled with either an extended Muslim family or a Muslim school outing. It was very hard to tell. But they certainly were having a great time singing and waving to the bystanders. Deb had seven of the children in one compartment and the remainder was two compartments behind. The train wound its way around the zoo and finally came back to the station. Our team leader was nearby as we piled out. Deb suggested that we get our group ice cream from on the vendors, but the team leader wanted to start assembling the groups back as it was nearly time to go, even though we were on IST. Each of the Novartis teams finally reassembled with a full complement of kids. We said our farewells to our group. The teachers made a final head count, and ran a gauntlet of vendors hawking everything from bubbles to bangles and beads. Hey Rogers and Hammerstein must have been here. Oh, Deb just reminded me it was baubles, not bubbles and it was the Levant, not Hyderabad. Now on the latter point, I contend that you could use local content to paint a cogent portrait. But I digress.
Our team leader assembled the Novartis Jawaharlal together for a debriefing, TGRs and TGWs. Good process improvement initiative. More TGRs than TGWs, and improvements will continue. He invited us all back for next month’s event. Deb had a good suggestion and sent it along this morning: nametags for the Jawaharlal members. It was hard enough with the kids’ names trying to learn all the Novartis people was a degree of difficulty on top of that without a scorecard.
Anyhow, we have been invited to visit Vinod Reddy and his family in Secunderabad this afternoon before we go to mass. We should have some interesting stuff from that. Talk to you soon.