We must apologize for delaying this report. We have used most of our little available time for email. Dick was concentrated during those times on using email to coordinate with a number of global parliament enthusiasts from around the world who will be converging here at the World Social Forum. If all goes well according to the plan in his mind, our Global Peoples Assembly Movement will make significant progress in much needed development by the time we leave. The next few days will be crucial and very busy. Mona has helped Dick as much as possible, giving suggestions on how to plan meetings, working on a press release, and so forth. On top of that, she is keeping a very detailed diary with which to write a book on our visit to India. These activities have all taken place within the context of bicycling the rest of the way to Bombay as well as meeting, talking and listening to local people, and becoming acquainted with what Mona calls "the real India."

Our last report brought us up to our first couple of days in Chennai (Madras). We stayed there for a little over a week attending a meeting called the Seventh Provisional World Parliament. As we mentioned in the last report, that meeting was conducted by a group that has pretty much the same goal as our Global Peoples Assembly Movement but takes a different approach. They have been working on this issue since 1958, so there was much for us to learn from them. The Secretary and powerhouse of their organization is Eugenia Almond, an amazing woman we had had the good fortune of meeting at the San Francisco Regional Peoples Assembly a couple of years ago. As this meeting, they worked on a number of issues, most notable of which was coming up with their recommendations for changes to the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court. This was a fascinating procedure in which several young Indian students from the City Montessori School of Lucknow were active participants.

A wonderful thing happened for us on the last day of the Chennai meeting. That was when we finally got round to handing out copies of our GPAM Charter which Dick and several others have just recently completed after two years of coordinated effort. What we had not anticipated was the reaction of this group to our charter. They became very excited and told us that we should have given it to them on the first day. They would have included it as part of the legislation they passed at this meeting. They see our charter as an excellent means of grass roots organizing and receiving input from the people into the process of working toward global democracy. They clearly got the point, of course, since that is what we intended it to be.

The Eighth Provisional World Parliament scheduled for Lucknow next year will feature our Charter as one of the first items on its agenda. The most important aspect of the Chennai meeting were the excellent Indian proponents of World Parliament we met there. Some of these were, especially Mr. Menon, mentioned in our last report, Professor Chavan of Aurangabad, and Professor Ananthanarayan of Chennai. Professor Chavan has offered to be GPAM's principal contact in India and will work on organizing here. He has even offered to host the Second Global Peoples' Assembly in Aurangabad. To our good fortune, Professor Chavan lives in Aurangabad, which is where we had planned to resume our bike trip to Bombay.

After the Seventh Provisional World Parliament, we took the train back to Aurangabad. I don't know if we mentioned that our train rides in India have been in overnight sleeper cars, which have been fun and educational. We sleep well on the train and wake up refreshed at our destination. Unfortunately, during the first night of our train ride, Dick found himself in severe pain from kidney stones. Fortunately, he still had some of his pain medication left from his former kidney stone which occurred on an Amtrak during a return trip from Eugene, Oregon to Seattle, a couple of years ago. We have no idea whether there is any logical coordination between train rides and kidney stones, but that necessitated a hospital emergency room visit for Dick immediately upon arrival at our intermediate destination, Hyderabad. We were impressed with the thoroughness and efficiency of this clinic but were even more impressed with the cost, less than $25 including x-rays, ultrasound, and consultation.

Mona has also developed a medical problem, which seems to be a sinus infection that will hopefully go away when she gets out of the polluted air of India. Unfortunately that infection proceeded toward her lungs, necessitating a couple of medical visits and a couple of rounds of antibiotics. The first doctor charged about $3.00. The second doctor was a most wonderful family doctor of our Servas host, Sushuma and her daughter Shweda, in Kurla, a neighborhood of Bombay. This doctor refused to charge anything, saying,  "You are here to help my country."  We have found that these types of generous, spiritual souls abound in India.  

We stayed several days with Professor Chavan at his farmhouse outside Aurangabad. There he is working on a special agricultural project which he assures us will enable the average Indian farmer with five acres of land to increase his income from 30,000R to 100,000R ($2000) per year. For one of those days Professor Chavan and his son, Sunil, arranged a wonderful program for us. This included a bike ride through Aurangabad escorted by two students from the Government College of Aurangabad, a press conference at Mr. Chavan's office, attended by not only the reporter but the staff of microbiologists. Finally we spoke to about one hundred students at the College and were awarded and appreciated with bouquets of flowers and little trophies.

Also included in our Aurangabad stay were visits to the Ellora and Ajanta caves. These are sites where dozens of huge Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain temples were carved into rocky cliffs from about 200BC to 700AD. The carving of statues was as advanced in some ways as the much later Italian Renaissance in Europe. The same is true of the wall paintings, some of which still remain to this day.

The one week bike ride from Aurangabad to Bombay will be a cherished memory of our lives. It included some of the most beautiful mountainous country we have seen in India, hills with many varieties of shapes and pinnacles and spires rising up on either side of the road. We celebrated Mona's 65th birthday in a village called Nandgaon. There the city fathers got together and gave her the most wonderful birthday party of her entire life. (More details will follow in her future book, which will be entitled,  Humble as the Dust). This followed several media interviews and a tour of the local Jain temple, where something different was quite obvious - all the historical temple leaders and gurus were pictured totally nude, except for some images of the founder in the same lotus-position as his contemporary, the Lord Buddha. Later when we saw two stark-naked pilgrims along the roadside we wondered if they were Jains, or perhaps Hindu holy men of unusual devotion, in a country that frowns upon nudity. 

A most remarkable aspect of our few days on National Highway 3 was our encounter with 5 or 6 groups of pilgrims walking along the roadside. These were mostly groups of men, from a few dozen to several hundred, walking to the holy city of Nasik, or to Shirdi, the birthplace of Sai Baba. But we saw one group of a dozen older women, all dressed in white, plus a small group of cyclists. One night we camped out under the stars in a beautiful little garden beside a restaurant, having been given permission by the proprietor to stay there for free. This was after we discovered that it was too far to the next real hotel (many of the "family garden restaurants" called themselves "hotels" to attract tourists, even though they had no overnight rooms). The man who persuaded the restaurant owner for us was a customer, himself a pilgrim (electrical engineer by trade), who had just returned from a 4 day, 150 km walk to Shirdi (with several support vehicles). He was most cheerful, though still suffering from blisters. The restaurant itself had built a handsome shrine to Sai Baba, where employees and customers could offer prayers and incense, ring the bell, and listen to a tape recorded chant that played all day.  

Our arrival in Mumbai (Bombay) has been unforgettable as well. We are staying a few nights as guests of a great organization called Alliance for a Responsible, Plural, and United World. This is in a 5 star hotel, which contrasts unbelievably with the real India. It is brand new, gorgeously designed, has hot water, a BATH TUB (our first in two months), incredible artwork, and not a speck of humble dust. Mona can even breathe in here. The amazing thing is that we can see filth, slums, and shanties from the window of our hotel. One man from China remarked that, unlike China and other countries, India does not hide its poor. We believe this is part of the unique democratic spirit of this great country. India is in the midst of a decades-long economic boom that may see an economic growth rate of 7% to 9% this year. The huge underemployment we have witnessed is gradually fueling a booming middle class as people are put to work. The government devotes very substantial resources to helping the poor, but immense problems aren't solved overnight. 

Surprisingly to Americans, Mona was told that only the poor vote. Feeling outvoted, the middle class instead complains about corruption and inefficiency. However our strong impression is that it is capitalism that is on the rise, not corruption. The Hindu nationalist government is even making peace with Muslim Pakistan, re-opening trade routes. Meanwhile business gloats over Indian companies buying out foreign firms and setting up "back-office" outsourced operations for multinationals from America and Europe, by leaps and bounds, especially in Bangalore and Hyderabad. 

Whither the future of India? Capitalistic materialism or spirituality for the ages? We suspect a hybrid that will lead the world to a new synthesis. 

-- Dick Burkhart & Mona Lee 
Bike for Global Democracy 
206-851-0027 
dickburkhart@comcast.net