Here we go

07/08/11

JORDAN: We finally went to a doctor last night, who might have been the sweetest man we've met in India, refused to charge us a penny for a half hour appointment and some prescriptions - although it's true we did not get to see him until after being swindled by an X-ray tech next door who claimed to work for the man and had to give me a mandatory screening (payment requested at moment of service). No relation to the doctor we kept asking to see. Now I have some souvenir head X-rays (my head looks cool). But after we finally saw the doctor, I think we feel much better about our health prognosis, and generally more optimistic about the status of Indian hospitality. He was a very sweet man who seemed to know all of our symptoms as soon as we sat down and was very encouraging and reassuring about how to treat ourselves.

Uploaded are some pics from Tarapur, where I went a couple weeks back for a comparative study relating to the planned Jaitapur nuclear power park. Jaitapur, if you recall, is where they're trying to build the world's largest nuclear power park, in a high earthquake risk zone, beside agricultural and fishing villages, in an ecological hotspot, without any legitimate studies for their environmental impact assessment. Tarapur is the site of India's first atomic plant, a few hours away, where radiation has leaked semi-regularly, there are cancer clusters surrounding the plant, and the fishing industry has died with all the local fish. The pics don't do the work of the interviews we took, but they give you a sense of the atmosphere.

The beach at Tarapur.

Crows on sticks.

The village

Another shot of the beach, but you can clearly see the nuclear plant on the opposite curve of the shore. It's real close.

I didn't conduct most of the interviews we took there that day, because they had to be in Marathi, but I got chunks of them translated and helped guide the questions based off what research we had gathered before coming. Here, I'm checking audio as we get a backup feed on my mic. I only include this picture because you can see the posse of villagers that just gathered around us as soon as we showed up. They came and waited in line to give testimonies about the impact of the nuclear plant. Apparently, there's a lot of cancer and radiation related health effects. We didn't even get to all of them.

This is the radiation level detector/siren the plant installed for the villagers. It hasn't worked in years.

Fun facts:

- Indian models are really, really fair-skinned compared to the man on the street - I want to say fairer skinned than 99% of the folks you actually see. They alternate between white European models and really fair Indian models. This observation was compounded when we went to the Buddhist pagoda and saw that all the paintings of the Buddha and his followers (there was a hall of paintings depicting Buddha's life) were also incredibly pale-skinned. Much paler than anyone who actually came to look at them. Not sure why this is.

- It is a sign of affection to take food in your hand and insert it into someone's mouth - not like romantically, but seemingly in the context of any affectionate relationship. This is weird for us, obviously, so we're thankful nobody has taken to us quite that fondly.