8/18/05

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My life in India, 2005-2006

10/17/2005

This past Wednesday I took my first trip outside the city since I arrived about two months ago. I went to Mysore, the former royal capital of the state of Karnataka (where Bangalore is the biggest city). Mysore is a very popular tourist destination, not just for people in this part of India but for everyone in the whole country. The city is about 140 km away from Bangalore (although the state of the roads connecting the two places makes it seem like a much longer distance).

Wednesday and Thursday were the last two days of a Hindu festival called Dasara. Sadly, I have no idea what Dasara celebrates. I think someone told me last week, but I’ve either forgotten or I didn’t understand in the first place. Frankly, it seems like there’s a holy day/series of days every week here. It’s amazing. And the Indian government also recognizes a bunch of Muslim holidays as well as days like Christmas and who knows what else, which means that in all probability, I won’t be working a full five days in any given week. But Dasara is huge, especially in Mysore – people come from all over to celebrate. The last day is marked by a procession of elephants in the courtyard of the royal palace. I couldn’t make it for that unfortunately (I watched the elephants on TV), but I did make it there the day before, which was almost as good.

There are at least two dozen tourist sites in Mysore, a city which really isn’t that big. There are Hindu temples, mosques, and cathedrals; a bird sanctuary; a giant garden complete with an illuminated water show set to music; a zoo; palaces and royal summer homes; and best of all, wild monkeys everywhere. The photos are here. They do a much better job of describing the city and what I actually did there.

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On Wednesday and Thursday the office was closed for Dasara, but Tuesday was also a de facto day off. That day Professor Vivekananda, an economist in our group, took us all out for a two-and-a-half hour lunch to celebrate the extension of his contract with the Foundation. We piled into my boss’s car (the five of us) and drove just down the street to the Maharaja, a restaurant which serves “Andhra-style” food. Andhra Pradesh is another state in South India, known around here for its large portions of delicious, spicy food. We each ordered a thali, which basically means guys kept coming to our table and piling rice, puris, lentils, papads, yogurt, sabji, curries, rassam, chutney, and ghee onto our plates. By the end of the meal I was so full I almost felt angry.

On our way to the restaurant, we were caught in traffic for a minute or two while some women beggars went from car to car nearby. That alone doesn’t make much of a story, of course. Beggars are pretty common in every part of the city. For me, the culture of begging here also took some getting used to. Back home I’d respond to a request for some spare change by actually looking the person in the eye and saying “no, sorry.” I figured if I wasn’t going to give to beggars then I might as well be polite about it. But here in Bangalore, I quickly found out that the only sensible approach to beggars is to completely ignore them. It really makes me feel awful, but if you actually say no in response to their request (or even smile) they will pester you for the next 10-15 minutes. Oftentimes they aggressively grab your arms or clothes. But most of the time they just stand there, usually a woman with a baby, speaking Kannada and putting their hands to their mouths and their babies’ mouths as a way to indicate that they’re hungry.

Some of them are part time street performers, including a sister and brother, probably aged 8 and 4, respectively, who put on this weird acrobatics/flexibility show on a street we drive by on the way to work in the morning. The little boy has a curly mustache penciled onto his upper lip, and does flips and handstands while his sister plays the drums on a tin plate. She sometimes bends her body in all directions, something I find more disturbing than entertaining. I gave them some fruit once, which was a big mistake, because I had to tell them a hundred times in a row afterwards that I wasn’t going to give them any money.

The point of this story isn’t to illustrate the begging industry in Bangalore. Nor is it to make myself seem like a coldhearted jerk, which I’ve probably done pretty effectively in the past two paragraphs. It’s only to tell you that the woman begging at this particular intersection was without a doubt the most beautiful woman I have seen in the past two months. It was crazy. She held her baby loosely in her right arm, and with this look of sorrow, probably half genuine and half contrived, walked up to each and every car that was stopped. Her hair was brittle and lightened from the sheer amount of dirt it was holding on to. She did the hand-to-mouth thing, each time tapping her fingertips on inexplicably straight, white teeth. I felt like I was watching a famous actress play the role of a homeless woman, except that the producers still wanted her to look gorgeous for the camera to sell tickets. Anyway that’s it, that’s the story.

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Everything is backwards here. This past Friday one of the economists in our office requested that I stop putting the toilet seat down after I use the bathroom. This is because he has to use his foot to put it back up in order to avoid touching the seat with his hand. (Don’t ask me why you can’t just wash your hands afterwards.) This is frustrating because back home it took me years to learn to remember to put the toilet seat down, after being threatened with death or serious injury. Now it seems I will have to unlearn all that, and I wonder what kind of retribution awaits me next year as I start the learning process over again from the beginning.

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