Kolkata: Durga puja and a leprosy trial Oct 2012

City celebrates Durga and we do our leprosy sums

My next stop was Kolkata, this city has managed to avoid India’s dash to modernity. The place is full of crumbling buildings and the stately Ambassador car tootles around the streets.  The architecture is a treat with many interesting 19 century buildings but this does not compensate for the obvious poverty. I also find the sight of rickshaw pulled by men offensive to human dignity.

Durga Puja is Kolkata’s big festival, many people would flee the city but I had arranged a review meeting of one of our leprosy studies so glimpsed the city festivities. Durga Puja lasts for 10 days and is when Durga renews her energy and defeats the evil in the world, bringing her female shakti energy. The festival happens around the temples and now these are covered in LED lights and each temple has its own flashing images, Ganesh or arjun. The temples also compete over designs and there are competitions between the temples with even sections for the most ecological temple. People are out all night at the temples and the police set up elaborate crowd control giving 2/3 road over to pedestrians. I found a list of nine things to do in Puja which included dancing, eating, catching up with friends, surrounding oneself with lights and wearing bling, sadly i had left my bling at home in London.

Instead of being out dancing all night in the temples we sat by day in a deserted leprosy hospital and toiled over the trial report. This is a big study involving 350 leprosy patients and we have added a new immune-suppressant drug to their treatment. As we have done the trials so people’s different strengths have emerged; Sundar Rao may be 78 and retired but he still has a very sharp statistical brain and keeps us on track.  Joydeepa is an enthusiastic clinician in West Bengal who skilfully enrolled and encouraged patients.  We also discovered that our young Tamilian physiotherapist has a great facility with data sets and understands what has happened to all the participants better than anyone else.  Disappointingly our treatment does not improve outcomes for leprosy patients with reactions.   Many trials do not have positive results and these results are just as important to generate to prevent people receiving useless treatments. But the intellectual satisfaction of having done a study properly does not compensate for the wish to find an improved treatment. 

Jan 2012

India: Sun Oct 21st

Maybe it is not surprising that there is a link between Wales and the Ghasi hills. The Welsh Presbyterian church git here in the 1800s, one Thomas Jones is much revered and had huge success with converting the population. We walked down to the village people were going to church looking serious and carrying black bibles. In the village of 250 souls there  were at least 5 welsh Presbyterian churches in varying degrees of plainness. Welsh hymns floated across the air. The house even looked Welsh with corrugated iron roofs. The gardens were lush with huge red flowers and lush vegetable patches, it felt like the end of a nice UK summer. WE walked down to viewpoint where one looked out over the cliffs and we saw the river winding through the forest and tiny villages deep in the forest.

On our journey back to Shillong i noticed how there was a gravel factory every 200 yards. The local people are busy excavating the whole mountain side and converting it into gravel for construction. It is a real eye sore. This is not regulated because the government doe s not own the land. It seemed a deep contradiction to the preservation of the forest. Mining also happens on a similarly haphazard way.

Back in Shillong we met up with Sandra’s and her family and had supper with Pat, the editor of The Shillong Times. She was a campaigner and seemed to have fast access to everyone in government.  

India: Sat Oct 20th

 Today we trekked out to see the living root bridges, a natural highlight of the area and a traditional way of using the forest resources. The sun was shining, despite Cheerapunjee being the wettest place on earth because the monsoon clods drop their rain when they reach the low mountains here. The jungle is so alive, the noise of crickets is earsplitting, huge butterflies flapped around black, yellow, brown and huge spiders guarded their webs. As we started out and we could see the waterfalls unlike yesterday. We walked down to a village and then trekked down through the forest walking on a set of about 2000 concrete steps, put in by the government with a plaque detailing the labour costs. People were coming up to market boys carrying small birds in bamboo cages. The forest was thick with a variety of trees, unfortunately our Ghasi gude was not familiar with the trees, when i asked him about the trees types he airly said “Jungle trees”! The root bridges were beautiful natural structures with thick roots growing out to the base and thinner roots forming the support pieces. They felt very strong and natural, unlike the wire bridges which we also crossed which felt fragile. The roots bridges take about 20 years to grow and last about 200. WE paused at villages in the forest, people had few possessions but we did see a school house. We had a refreshing swim in the cold blue mountain water. Then we had a hours climb up old stone steps to the top of a ridge, few people came along this path, our guide said he had last done this long walk a year ago. We got back to the village in time to have tea and enjoy the view down the steep cliffs to the Bangladesh plain with rivers. Omer was v keen to get back to Cheerapunjee for sun set and so we sped back up the hill and were just in time for the sunset and a rest.

India: Fri Oct 19th

Omer and I spent three hours in the Don Bosco museum in Shillong. This is a wonderful new museum spread out over 10 floors which describes life and traditions in the NE. There are galleries on fishing, hunting, crafts and religion. I had not appreciated that one could fish with bamboo in so many different ways. Because the museum had been built by the Jesuits there was a whole gallery devoted to 20 centuries of Christianity, In the topography section the Jesuit missions were located. There was also a fine installation piece by Dutch artists on the cultural DNA of the region. At the very top a steel frame skywalk  looped round the roof with 360 degree views of Shillong. It was not raining so we enjoyed the view. The city is spread over several hills and there are trees everywhere. There also films of local dances including a yak dance which reminded me of the Yaks i saw in Tibet last year. This area also feels close to Tibet and there is an Indo-Tibetan police force in Shillong. We then drove 2 hours to Cheerapunjee which is on the border with Bangladesh.. About half way we crossed into a deep valley withe the sides covered with dense forest. We crossed over to a huge waterfall which we only glimpsed through swirling  cloud. W.e reached cheerapunjee in time to see a beautiful sunset with the sun dipping down through purple clouds. This was Omer’s first mountain sunset.

India Thurs Oct 18th

Sandra, like me, packs her days full. So today we had a crash course in Ghasi culture and beliefs. We started off spending an hour wandering through a sacred forest. This is an area kept untouched by the tribes and has trees, medicinal plants and pure water there. We wandered in and along a narrow path, orchids bloomed, birds were flitting around. The sunshine filtered through the trees on to the stream. A fine quiet place. We then headed back to shilling, pausing for tea and rice cakes with green paste in a tiny tea shop where the woman had the brightest shining pans. In Shillong we stopped to look at the Martin Luther University, where Sandra’s husband Glen’s is vice chancellor. He has had the drab conctere exterior decorated by local artists.We then headed to Sandra’s office. She has reclaimed a tiny space in the dept of health. The adjacent rooms were packed from floor to ceiling with boxes of malaria tabs, Falciparum malaria is a big problem here. She and the central planners in Delhi have big plans to create  a Shillong Indian Insitute of Public health. A site has been identified on the edge of town and 21 acres fenced off. Right now it has pine trees and birds were flitting around. I wonder what building will come up here.  In the evening Omer and i walked down to the bazaar for supper. People were out buying presents for the upcoming Durga Puuja and Omer said it reminded him of sudan just before thier Eid celebration  

Blog from North East india Oct 2012

This series of blogs will come from a work trip to India. I have a busy programme with a visit to Sandra Albert, DrPH student in Shillong, NE India, Then a meeting Kolkata to review the results of a trial that we have done trying to improve the treatment of leprosy reactions. Then i have four days in Mumbai reviewing the work of Omer, a Sudanese PhD student who is working on neuropathic pain. Ideally i would have visited these sites in reverse order because the visit to NE India is the lightest of the trips and is shall be having a weekend in a nature reserve at the wettest place on earth. But holidays and other peoples availability meant that I shall start in North East India. This is a huge area which borders Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet and Myanmar. It is very wet because it has a heavy monsoon which is dropped on the land when the clods meet the mountains there.  It is also distinctive in not having the caste system, instead people belong to tribes. They are also mainly Chrisitian and they feel a long way from Delhi.

Wed  Oct 17^th

On my flight from London  i sat next to a young Indian woman who had her pilots licence and had lived in Shillong for  a year and was v enthusiastic about it especially the shopping. I then had a fabulous flight from Delhi to Gauwahati in Assam. First we flew over the flat plains of N india , then over the Ganges which had loops of river. There were forests on the hillsides, these then became small clumps around farmhouses and the area flattened out into a huge rice paddy. My Sudanese student Omer met me at the airport and we then had a 4 hour taxi ride to Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya. Gauwahati was flat but we soon ascended into the hill road. It was a long journey shared with countless Indian lorries with their bight logos of animals and goddesses on the lorry sides. In Shillong we stayed in a newly opened B+B. It is cold up here, ones needs jackets. The book at the B+B had a good description of Shillong architecture which seems to be a cross of India and Home counties in the capital. The houses have verandahs and peaked corrugated iron roofs.