Saturday, February 21, 2009

Kothapalem

There is much video footage in this post since I went a little crazy with the digital camera.

On the day we left to Nellore, I finally got over my weird stomach sickness, which was very fortunate because I would be DANCING on stage the next day. The day before, my dad had gone to Kothapalem, the village near Nellore where he was born. We would first stop by there and then go to Madhu Baabai's house in Nellore. Remember, Baabai = what you call your dad's younger brother. In my next post, I shall explain how this Telugu family naming stuff works.

So that morning, my mom, aunt, uncle, Naveen, Vishnu, and I packed into the car and headed off to Nellore. My aunt got off somewhere in between since she was going to bring some of her Ongole relatives to see me dance. Ahh.

We finally got to Nellore and I gave up reading my bootlegged Brisingr and decided to take some video instead since I had been transferred to the front seat of the car. In the first video, you will first see the horrible congested traffic of Nellore (and most Indian cities). And then in the second video, as we travel in the countryside as we go to Kothapalem, you can see lush greenery.



In this second video (where we are going to Kothapalem), I have provided English subtitles for your entertainment. The ones you mainly hear talking are my mom, Naveen, and Vishnu. I uploaded this video to YouTube so you can see things better.




So when we got to Kothapalem, we finally found what all the fuss was about. It turns out that my dad had organized for a veterinary camp here, where he invited a bunch of his former classmates from the Veterinary College in Tirupati (where I was born). They were basically doing some checkups and stuff for the buffaloes brought in by the local farmers. They were also given some free medicines and stuff like that. It was actually very cool to see, especially since during the last trip, we had set up an eye surgery camp. I actually liked this better because I think buffaloes are much cooler than people, at least from a medical perspective. They also complain less. You see, before my dad got his PhD and started working at MIT with research animals, he used to be a large animal veterinarian, i.e. cattle, goats, pigs, etc. This is why he set this whole thing up.


By the time we had gotten there, the camp was wrapping up, but we did get to see someone stick his hand up the anus of one of the buffalo. The whole place also smelled like manure. I got too close to one of the buffalo and she flailed her horns at me, smacking me the elbow. However, if I said i didn't enjoy myself, I'd be lying. I've always loved animals.


We found a cute little buffalo guy tied up next to the house. We named him Mahesh Babu. Then, his owner came up to us and told us he was a girl! We renamed him Meenakshi. It turns out that female livestock is much more valuable than male livestock because they provide milk as well as labor. They are also much easier to handle. And they don't even need males since nowadays everyone uses artificial insemination for their cattle. Anyway, here is a picture of me and Meenakshi and a video of her with the boys.



The few hours I spent in Kothapalem reminded me of this one book my dad gave me called "All Living Things" written by James Herriot, a farm animal veterinarian back in the 50s. He talks about all his enjoyable and unenjoyable experiences in the large animal practice...treating horses, cows, and other animals that people depended on for their livelihood. It was a really cool book. I know its not all fun and games, but in many ways, I prefer this type of a work environment to a laboratory or a super sanitized hospital. It would be so cool.

Here's a cow. It was the only one there. The rest were buffalo. I think the black variety you find in South India are a type of water buffalo, but I'm not sure. They look like this (and they were also in the second video):


Okay, so I was originally going to talk about my dance performance in this post, but I guess I'll have to do that in the next one. I always end up having so much to write! I guess that's a good thing. SO we finally drove back to Nellore to my Baabai's house, where I was unexpectedly surprised by some newspaper journalists! Read more about it in my next post.
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