We love mangoes. Truly, if you’d asked us last year, before we came to India, we would surely have told you all about how much we loved mangoes. The very idea of mangoes was one of the lures of India.
One of Melissa’s favorite childhood memories is of her father coming home with a big box of mangoes, so excited to have found them at the store (back in the 70’s when they weren’t always so easy to find in the US), and teaching her how to cut out the pit at an angle, slice the fruit into long strips, and then scrape the flesh off the peel with her teeth (this last bit of the lesson might explain why he was so frequently ill in India).
When we got here, we looked at every street vendor’s cart, eager to buy our first Indian mangoes, but could never find any. We briefly imagined that the tender coconuts we saw everywhere were mangoes, but were quickly corrected. Oh, the disappointment when we were told that we’d have to wait until April for the start of mango season, and that the really good mangoes wouldn’t appear until May!
And now they’re here, in all their glory, and entirely worth the wait. In the US, we’re only aware of two kinds of mangoes: the larger, green and red ones with orange flesh that are usually just listed as Mangoes, and the smaller yellowish ones that are usually listed as Champagne Mangoes. In India that are over 20 varietals. Some are tart, some are sweet, and some are both. Some taste so floral that they nearly seem perfumed. Some are large, firm, and dark green, used for grating into salads or making chutneys. Some are so soft that they’re difficult to cut without mashing and they melt when they hit your tongue.
Every year, a mango market suddenly appears for the few months of mango season. While every grocery store has a proud mango display with at least six different varietals on offer, the mango market is where you can find at least 20 booths with every single kind of mango and buy them from the farmers who grow them. We were so excited to join a tour of the market put on by Five Oceans because it seemed so daunting that we wouldn’t have known where to begin on our own. With the tour, we got information sheets to describe many of the different types and then had the opportunity to taste 12 kinds. Sadly, we mistook our bite of raspuri for a sendura and failed to win the blind taste test at the end. Shame. We consoled ourselves by buying a big bag of our favorites: Sendura, Alphonso, and Mallika. We have since returned for more of the above plus some Raspuris. It’s our intention to go every week and eat mangoes every day while we can. We hear that we can cut them into chunks and throw them into the freezer to enjoy off-season as well. We’ll certainly do that!
We learned a new trick to preparing mangoes to add to Melissa’s dad’s instructions. After cutting around the pit and slicing the fruit into long strips, slide the mango along the rim of a glass as close to the peel as possible. It gets every bit of the fruit while avoiding any bacteria on the peel.
that includes the World Trade Center, the Sheraton, and the Orion Mall, all arranged around a lovely man-made lake with a huge tree and evening fountains. We now have easy access to movies, delicious restaurants, a grocery store, and, one of the great rarities in Bengaluru, a wine store with a stable, cool temperature. We also have the neighborhood of Malleshwaram with its markets and temples and local charm just a short walk away. And we have a metro stop just a block away – on the clean and pleasant metro, we can get anywhere around downtown.
standards) trucks and a crew of eight. They shrink wrapped all of our furniture to move safely, and, despite the stop at Kaveri’s house, had us completely moved in by around 2:00, leaving us time to feel close to unpacked by the time we went out for our celebratory dinner at Indian Kitchen in the courtyard outside the Orion Mall. Using the CIS drivers also meant that the process of planning the move was handled primarily by our facilities manager Prem, who handled so much of the weird beauraucratic snafus that we had almost no worries going in to the day.
the diamond of India, bordered by Bhutan, Tibet, China, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. The language sounds different, facial features are different, and the culture is different (women fare far better here than in many parts of India). The dress looks very similar, however, and, while there are local delicacies, the food is also quite similar. We chose Assam in an effort to see something special while escaping the summer heat closing in on much of the country. We also wanted to take a shorter trip for spring break since we were planning to move soon after. From the time we touched down mid-morning on Sunday to the time we left on Thursday afternoon, we were nothing but happy. Assam was amazing.
Many of the 
are empowered and pushed to excel. They know that they are as capable as the boys around them, and that they can accomplish anything they set out to do. And just as importantly, the boys know it too. Marriage is something the girls of Shanti Bhavan can consider on their own terms and on their own timelines, should they choose to consider it at all. But first they can discover their own passions and chase their own dreams.
pursue more education. She intends to become a clinical psychologist, able to support children like those in her village, who have experienced trauma and suffer depression. Her younger sister’s suicide at 14 is a constant and painful inspiration for Shilpa. In her memory, she will make a difference in the world. She shares her story in presentations around the world, and in her book, 
a need and designs a service to address that need. Many of the participants, especially the organizers and facilitators, were specialists in service design, a particular type of design focusing on designing not necessarily products to fill the need, but an entire service experience. The idea is to anticipate the many touchpoints where our clients would come in contact with our service and make sure that everything happens with an eye on fulfilling the objective.
with vastly differing ideas about what “consent” was referring to, from sexual consent to wedding consent to intellectual properties consent. After an at times touchy process to come to consensus, including the intellectual properties voice dropping out, The Scary Heroic Rollercoasters finally came to focus on sexual assault and designed an app that would help a woman (or man, in rare cases) deal with the moment of assault, from call for help from others in the bar, to locating counselling, to calling the police.
consent refers to then focused on a single aspect, Tom’s group, The Pill Hard to Swallow, kind of went the opposite direction. They started out focused on sexual consent on Friday evening, but then on Saturday morning decided that one of the problems is that the answer “no” means nothing in India, whether it’s a sexual context or at a meal with friends. The Pill Hard to Swallow ended up designing a card game not unlike Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, matching people to aggressor behaviors. Players decide how to react to those behaviors then wrote possible consequences for that response. The idea was to help people add various was to say “no” to their vocabulary and to start training people to take “no” for an answer.
games to narrow the topics, stepped back frequently to make sure we were asking the right questions, and we even went out on the street to test our questions on random people. By the end, we were 
able to put together presentations that were shared in the group and uploaded to the Global Service Jam’s website (though we’re having a hard time finding it – we’ll share that link if we ever locate it).
(called “strings”) onto a small card and then filling in the spaces. I began doing it all the time at home, sometimes focused in the silence, and sometimes while watching TV or listening to an audiobook. I even Zentangle when I’m out and about, carrying my special pens and a couple colored pencils in my purse most of the time, so if I find myself waiting semi-patiently for something, I can pass the time with a quick Zentangle.
Wellserton Wanderings 