Hend

My life in India, 2005-2006

 

10/3/2005

 

This past Thursday I took a Bangalore bus for only the second time. The auto rickshaw drivers were on strike, and my host family’s father decided not to take the motorbike in the morning because it was raining. We were lucky enough to have a car swing by and get us in the morning. But in the afternoon we had to make other arrangements, and thankfully Bangalore has a pretty expansive public bus service.

 

The reason I had only taken the bus once before is that I took the bus once before. Since then I’ve told myself I would only take a bus if I had no choice. A bus ride is really cheap (7 rupees, or roughly 20 cents can carry me the distance between home and work), but harrowing for an outsider. Early on in my stay here I tried it out in the morning to get to work (the #201 bus directly links my home and office). That day it was absolutely packed. The women get in the front of the bus and the men in the back, and not surprisingly the back is the more crowded of the two ends. I had to elbow a bunch of guys to get on in the first place, and when I finally did we were stacked like books from end to end. Very commonly you see guys hanging onto the outside of overcrowded buses here, and you’ve got to commend the desire and initiative of these guys, but that has got to be the most dangerous thing I can think of doing in this city.

 

You can imagine what the back of a bus here must smell like. But even during a busy morning commute, the smell is tolerable. What was more of a concern was that on that particular morning, the bus was so crowded that I couldn’t see where I was going. I asked the guy collecting fares to tell me when we got to the Koramangala bus depot, but his English was shaky and I had no idea if he understood me. After what seemed to be 30 minutes, and without a clue of where we were, I wiggled out of the bus hoping to be somewhere close. Miraculously, I was right across the street from my office.

 

So I try to avoid buses in general, not because I dislike the scent of 100 guys’ collective body odor, but because I’m scared I’ll end up in Tamil Nadu by accident. But on Thursday there was no choice, and I had my host family father with me, so there we were. Luckily it was not as crowded, and I even got a seat in the very back. After a few minutes the guy to my left gets up and another one takes his place. Pretty soon the new guy next to me starts making small talk (that’s pretty rare for Bangaloreans), and after telling me what he does (call center guy) and asking what I do he launches into a cogent and aggressive argument for why I should give him a job. Now, I have said one meaningful word about my job to this point: “development.” He has no idea what that means, but I don’t think he cares. He tells me he has lots of experience with customers. I tell him we don’t interact with any. He asks for my business card. I tell him I don’t have one. He then… I cut him off and tell him I’m sorry that I can’t help him.

 

Amazingly, this guy continues to explain why I should hire him. I tell him I have no one working under me, that the only person lower down on my organization’s ladder is (maybe) the girl who mops the floors in the morning. Furthermore, I tell him there aren’t a lot of jobs to be filled or money to me made in my area. To drive the point home, I tell him that he probably makes at least 2-3 times what I do (which is true). He doesn’t care. He says that he’s worried that the US federal government will put a stop to outsourcing, and put him out of the job. I tell him the chances of that are slim to none, but he keeps going. The guy is determined, he will not be denied, he is in the zone now. He is a virtuoso of ask-a-stranger-for-a-jobedness. He is the Michael Jordan, the Yascha Heifetz, and the Takeru Kobayashi of his craft, all wrapped into one.

 

His spiel is interrupted when we get to his stop. I’m left wondering how long he would have gone on for. Instantly I miss him, and wonder if he would have continued if I had just lied and told him I was in the circus or a traveling salesman of Hare Krishna books. I watch him zip out the door and think to myself, that guy is going places. And by places, I mean home. That guy is going home.

 

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The concept of forming a cue in public places is mostly absent in Bangalore. In take out food places, I quickly discovered that if I don’t shove some money in the cashier’s face and tell him what I want before someone else does, I’ll eventually go hungry. I always imagined that making lines was an indicator of development. In a place where lines are common, no one is there to punish you if you cut someone. But in these places the social stigma of line cutting makes for an environment in which you’d prefer to just wait rather than cut and feel ashamed. This type of shame doesn’t exist here, which also explains why you can nearly run over a pedestrian with your Tata Sumo SUV without remorse, or urinate on the side of the road as if crowds of people weren’t walking by. You never understand how efficient lines are until you come to a place where they don’t use them. I have heard some people (only Westerners) make apologetic statements about how the non-line, mob the desk/window system is actually more efficient because it rewards those with the most initiative or who most urgently need to be served. But I personally think that argument is garbage.

 

So as the people of Bangalore started earning higher incomes and their standard of living improved, the waiting-in-line thing should become more common, right? You might imagine that the presence of public lines is an indicator of social development, like GDP is an indicator of economic development. With development should come certain changes in lifestyle, not just more money and ‘stuff’. But actually, the opposite has happened in the case of public lines in Bangalore. A generation ago, years before Infosys or any call center, Bangaloreans were seen as the most diligent in terms of forming and staying in lines. An old saying joked that if a guy in Bangalore stood in place for a minute, he could turn around to find a line having formed behind him. But as other people flocked to the city from all over India, this cultural quality got diluted. So the line-forming phenomenon actually declined as the level of wealth increased.

 

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Like I’ve written before, South India is a predominantly vegetarian place. My family doesn’t even allow eggs in the kitchen, although they let me bring meat from outside and eat it in my bedroom. Because almost all dishes are vegetarian, anything with meat is called non-veg. You can just assume everything is veg unless it’s otherwise indicated.

 

Before a few days ago I was getting non-veg meals from a shady place called the Imperial Hotel (a “hotel” can refer to a restaurant, not just a place where you spend the night). The place is run by Muslim guys, like most of the non-veg food places in Bangalore. They have about 50 items on the menu, but usually there are only about ten things available at any given time. Usually I would order chicken kabab, which to my surprise is deep fried red-colored chicken that is spicy as the depths of hell. Not really my definition of kabab, but it does the job.

 

A few days ago I found a much better non-veg place, finally. It’s a chain called Empire Fast Food (apparently the imperialism theme is popular for non-veg places). It’s about 15-minute walk from my home, but it’s worth it. For 49 rupees (about a dollar) they give you a couple pieces of chicken, ghee rice (buttery plane rice), two small parotas (type of flat bread), a curry, lentils, and some onions. I basically eat meat once every 2-3 days, which is fine. When I do, though, it is so gratifying. Back home I used to chew on chicken bones now and again. Now I am so appreciative of meat I find myself tempted to actually eat the whole bone after I’m done. I am like a prehistoric man who’s just discovered bone marrow. k=366

 

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Right now I’m sitting in the dark in my room. It’s 7:29 pm and the power has just cut out for the third time in the last hour. The unreliability of electricity is one of the frustrating things about this city. The people here are totally inured to it, and I don’t really get that upset anymore, either. Cutting out this frequently is unusual; during a normal workday we have two or three of these, each one lasting a few minutes. In my office no one really says anything, partly because we have a backup source of power that keeps the computers and the main lights working, and partly because gaps in electricity are a normal part of life in this city.

 

 

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