Chennai, India

There is a lot to say about India and a lot of emotion that goes with it. We got off the plane in Chennai just 2 days ago and will be leaving tomorrow at midnight. Fly in at night, leave at night. The only real view we had of Chennai will be from the taxi drives on main roads as we went from place to place. I don't know if we have missed the country entirely or seen an accurate slice at all. What we have seen is the beauty of a five-star hotel, the filth and poverty of huts alongside the road, the blank look of non-emotion on most faces and the calmness of the ocean that spit up a tsunami less than 1.5 years ago.

We drove to Artlab to meet with Sharon, Sunny and Noel - the three partners who have ventured into a web design company and school. This team was immediately likeable. Their lab is on the ocean, only meters away from the surf. They employ 12 people and have lovely grounds that include a fish pond with more than 150 goldfish.

At first, our meeting is slightly awkward as we try to figure out what it is that we have all been arranged to meet about. We move through the websites learning more and more about each other. I wonder at what point Sharon realized that we are a possible partner in the west. She is beautiful - a muslim woman whose conversion to Christianity has cost her her entire family. Her husband, Sunny, is a hindu who converted to Christianity some time ago and also lost ties with his family. They are people whose lives are profoundly touched by their decision to embrace a new way of thinking and living by following Jesus Christ. Their web company and school exist to make a difference in a country where hopelessness stretches for miles upon endless miles.

Sharon tells us about how the Indian school system trains the children to memorize and repeat instead of to think. Creative arts demand that you think and form opinions. It takes a month for most of their students to find an opinion of their own. Art is undoing a lifetime of rote learning for these students. She speaks to us about the caste system in India and wonders out loud how they can change an entire culture's thinking about one another. She says that even on their compound the cook, the doorman and the gardner would feel deep shame to be invited to join the group for afternoon tea. It isn't simple to bring new thinking - not to the students and not to the people. Their role at Artlab is to bring Indian students into a safe place to think their own thoughts and discover their own creative arts. Something about the way Sharon talks that makes you want to join this gentle woman in every effort to bring newness to the hopelessness that lines every street of the city.

We arrived at Artlab by driving for miles and miles along the IT Corridor of Chennai. It reminded me (only slightly) of the Silicon Valley. Large corporate buildings unmatched by anything else we saw in all of Chennai. These huge buildings house internet technology companies from the west and each has their own bus to gather their employees and drive them around in the mess of streets that enter the corridor. The funniest thing was to see a building of such magnitude being built with scaffolding made entirely of wooden sticks. Five stories of scaffolding that seemed like it could collapse with the weight of one human surrounding a fully glass building plucked out of the west.

There is an expression on people's faces - I have been trying to think of what it might be called. Perhaps "bland" or "blank". It is not an emotion as much as a state of being. There is no overt happiness in the faces we see in traffic, no conversations between people producing laughter or giggles. I saw a man tickle his baby beside the road and it struck me as unusual - his large smile, his male hands holding a baby, his baby writhing with delight. It was so out of place that it made me look twice.

I have only been here for 2 days and so my observations touch nothing more than the surface - there is no real understanding of this culture, the history, the reasons, the life. I just don't get it. All I have are western eyes staring at the totally strange world of India glimpsing the familiar and trying to comprehend the rest.

Our dinner last night ended up in fits of laughter as our emotions have been stretched thin by all we have seen and heard in the day. Anything makes us laugh - a carrot carved as a flower, a candle lit and re-lit - nothing at all... our emotions are all mixed up and we are all giddy as we try to manage all the poverty, hurt, destruction and wealth that we have seen in one day.