INDIA UP CLOSE

T. J. ROYAL
Staff Writer

May 13, 2008 10:37 am

— Edgecombe Community College math and religion instructor Paul Tolbert recently spoke to the Tarboro Kiwanis Club about his two-week experience in India last summer.
The World View service at UNC-Chapel Hill coordinated Tolbert's trip. Tolbert said World View's purpose was to expose K-12 and community college teachers to economic globalization forces and world culture learning. Teachers are responsible for bringing lessons they learned from their trips into the classroom.
Tolbert talked about his education and military background. Tolbert is a first lieutenant in the Army Reserves since he recently completed a 13-week course at Fort Jackson, S.C. He is now a deployable reservist and serves as a chaplain with the 108th platoon.
Tolbert began his presentation with a rhetorical question: "Why should we even bother" learning about other cultures? he asked.
Tolbert first spoke about the shift of the world's population over a 100-year period, from 1950 to 2050.
In '50, Tolbert said one-third of the globe's population lived in Europe and North America; the world's largest cities then were New York, London, Tokyo, Moscow and Paris.
In 2050, Tolbert said only one-tenth of the world's population will live in Europe and North America. In 42 years, Tolbert said the five largest cities in the world are projected to be Tokyo, Mumbai, India; Lagos, Nigeria; Daka, Bangladesh and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Also by 2050, Tolbert said the list of the world's 30 most populace cities will include several that American citizens know little about, and that are not especially friendly to the U.S., like Tehran, Iran.
Tolbert's global statistics, about China and India in particular, surprised many of the gathered Kiwanis.
Tolbert said China's population with the highest IQ, 25 percent, outnumbers the entire population of North America. In American schools, Tolbert said 1 million students study a language spoken by only 80 million people worldwide; French. He added that only 40,000 American students study a language spoken by more than 1.5 billion people; Mandarin Chinese.
For a country nearing a population of 1 billion, and growing faster than China, Tolbert said India's emergent middle class numbers 300 million people. Tolbert added that, according to Forbes, 60 percent of India's population is under the age of 32.
After Tolbert gave the staggering numbers for India, Ronnie Daughtry asked him if he had the image of Mother Teresa and the poor in his mind before he went to the country. Tolbert said he did, and that there certainly was a great amount of poverty there.
Tolbert said many people were still using camels for travel and work, and that panhandlers in several parts of the country make more money begging than they could working at a regular job.
He contrasted India's poverty with the strides it has made in technology and science, and how its capital, New Delhi, is one of the "most modern" and "technologically advanced" cities in the world.
He said he came away feeling that India "straddled between the 21st and 15th centuries" in every day life.
But as a religion instructor and Army Reserve chaplain, Tolbert said the "really exciting" part of his trip came during the last week. In that week, he visited several of the holiest locations in the country for Hinduism and Buddhism, including the Ganges River at the city of Varanasi, where Hindus cremate their dead and spread their ashes in the river, and the city of Khajuraho, with its kama sutra temple.
Tolbert said he felt the "religious vibes were huge" in these locations.
"As a Baptist Christian, they were pulsating," Tolbert said.
Tolbert said he saw cremations take place on the banks of the Ganges, and that he also saw human remains placed in the river. But these scenes did not bother him, as he said people did their laundry in the river and that he swam in it for recreation.
When Tolbert talked briefly about the Kama Sutra temple, with its graphic depictions of sex on its outer walls, the Kiwanians were affably disappointed that he could not get his visual slideshow to work.
Tolbert said that overall, western civilization is linear, with its focus on the beginning and inevitable end of time, the creation story and armageddon. He added that in eastern cultures like India's and China's, life and death are treated as a circular cycle, with beliefs in reincarnation that affect society and their technological and economic development.
Tolbert said he hoped that World View would be an opportunity to exchange cultural ideas across continents, and share the best of each of them with others. Tolbert said one positive influence the West could have in the cultural exchange is its emphasis on the more equal standing of men and women.
But Tolbert also said he openly wondered how the cyclical eastern philosophy would affect "our technology and education" in the West.
Asked if he would like to travel to India again, Tolbert said that a second trip to the country would be very expensive. But he said that the World View trip was a "great once in a lifetime experience." He said that his trip last summer gave him a "thirst" to see other parts of the world; he mentioned Turkey as another place he would like to visit.
"(I) hope to do a lot more traveling," Tolbert said.

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