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11/4/05
I’m finally sitting down at 8:01 pm on Friday, 11/4, nearly two weeks since I last spent some time with my friend Dell and hammered out one of these. I’ve reached the end of a busy day and an even busier past ten days, and I’ve just polished off a half a chicken that was downright delicious but has left my mouth feeling like a blowtorch. I’ve got some more goodies leftover, too: an apple, a ladu, and a chocolate burfi are sitting on my nightstand and beckoning me to finish this journal entry quickly.
Since I arrived here 80 days ago I have, for the most part, followed a simple routine: wake up, go to work, come home, study, check my email, maybe play some Street Fighter 2 Turbo Edition with my friend Dell, and go to bed. Having taken the GMAT last weekend, thankfully I can start coming out of my shell. Unfortunately the GRE is around the corner, so the onset of post-graduation senioritis will have to wait another week.
Studying has kept me busy, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. This past week at work we finalized all the details for a World Bank-funded conference on Citizen Report Cards that we are hosting starting Monday morning. I’m looking forward to it, mostly because it will entail my going out to the “field” (I don’t like that word but there’s no alternative) for the first time since I arrived… basically interviewing some slum and rural Bangaloreans. Of course, from my perspective the city of Bangalore itself is the “field”, but occasionally I’m reminded of what real poverty is. Taking the bus home after work tonight, we passed a collection of makeshift tents covered with plastic tarp and dirty cloth. I looked inside one of them as we passed by and in the darkness saw only a hand holding a candle. And then the guy walking on the sidewalk with no shoes on all of a sudden didn’t seem so poor.
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Here are four things I’ve seen in the past 80 days that deserve mentioning (but not necessarily reading)…
1. A woman peeing on the side of the street. There are men peeing everywhere here. I feel like I’m living in a Fenway Park men’s room, in the years before they removed those horse-trough urinals. It’s fascinating to see this many guys going in public (does that make me weird?). Some walls even have no-urinating instructions on them, written in a variety of ways. Do not urinate. No urinate. Here no urine-ate. The possibilities are endless. Anyway, it’s fascinating but not shocking – it’s not like people back in Boston don’t make an unscheduled pit stop every once in awhile. And being a member of the international Y-chromosome club, I have my own not-so-proud history when it comes to this. But regardless, I have never seen a woman peeing in public until a week or so ago. It was bewildering. I was nonplussed (thank you, Kaplan GRE book). I mean, this was a few feet onto the shoulder of 80 Feet Road, one of the busiest streets in the neighborhood where my office is located. She looked around and crouched, people just nonchalantly walking by, and then I actually saw the stream. Amazing. Anyway, are you eating? Sorry.
2. A man bribing a traffic cop. Petty bribery in Bangalore’s public services is well documented. Hell, the majority of women here have to pay a bribe to city maternity homes just to leave the clinic with their baby. Corruption is bad enough such that without it, there’d be no Public Affairs Center, no Public Affairs Foundation, and I’d still be sitting in a one-bedroom apartment in South Boston watching Seinfeld reruns. Until yesterday, though, all my information on such bribery was second-hand. I’d heard about the maternity homes and the under-the-table property registration payments that even my anti-corruption coworkers have succumbed to. I’ve flipped through pages of statistics and bore-you-to-death reports on bribery in the city. But yesterday, I saw something interesting. Waiting on the back of Prasad’s motorbike at a red light on the way home from work, I had a good minute or two to actually watch a motorist who’d been pulled over take out his wallet, remove some bills, and hand it to a smiling traffic cop. I laughed out loud from astonishment and asked Prasad if I’d in fact seen what I’d just seen. He nodded disappointingly, the light turned, and that was that. The good news is, I have a job.
3. An Indian TV actor playing the role of an annoying American. A couple nights ago I was preparing some dinner in the kitchen while my host family’s mom and son were watching a Hindi-language drama on TV. As I walked through the living room with my food in hand, I heard one of the actors break out into English in a thick Indian accent, which happens every once in a while on TV programs here. Dude! Do you even know who I am dude?! Do you know what I could do to you?! Of course I laughed and continued on my way. But a few steps up the stairs I realized, just from one line of dialogue and a few glances at the screen, who this character was supposed to be: an arrogant, ugly-American type, probably the easy-to-hate token bad guy of the hour. I am not going to summarize all the crazy things I’ve heard people say about Americans since I’ve been here (that discussion could fill up a journal entry unto itself, and I’ve already written more about this below). It’s not like Americans are reviled. But visiting India has just reaffirmed my opinion that even among his allies, Uncle Sam has some serious PR work ahead of him.
4. Story-of-Noah-like flooding. A week ago or so some parts of South India endured horrible flooding. It actually wasn’t that bad from my perspective. One day it just seemed to rain heavily from morning to afternoon, and when it came time to leave the office we looked outside and saw that much of the road was totally submerged. Prasad and I wisely elected to take an auto or the bus rather than his motorcycle. We stood under an umbrella on the corner (near where that lady had peed) and watched countless autos, cars, two-wheelers, and bikes drive up to the underwater patch of road and turn around. Some of them ploughed through the nearly two-feet of brownness, probably the most efficient way to total your car. In any case, the bus eventually came, we jumped on, and it thankfully survived the swim. Only a couple days later did I realize the extent of the flooding, when I got an email with a link to a BBC news story about it. The following morning, a friend from Bangalore who works for Reuters sent out a mass email with photos of the aftermath. My life continued virtually uninterrupted (my neighborhood drains pretty well, and the roads to the office dried quickly), but for others in this city the damage was serious. From Southeast Asia to the Gulf Coast to Maharastra to Bangalore to Keene, New Hampshire, this has been a pretty bad year in terms of death by water.
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How could I almost forget to write about the Hindu festival of Divali that was celebrated this past Tuesday? Divali celebrates Lord Rama’s return after vanquishing his nemesis, Ravana… I think. I have heard about five different explanations of what Divali is.
About a month ago an Indian friend of mine was talking about the coming of Divali. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Everyone lights crackers, and the whole city is illuminated.” This puzzled me, because I imagined a million people lighting saltines on fire and saving them around. “Why do they light crackers?” I asked. I figured there must be a reason for such a huge waste of food.
Without exaggeration, it took me three weeks, basically until two or three days before the festival, to figure out that people light firecrackers on Divali. This sounds fun, but it drove me bananas. The cheapest and most common ones are the “bombs”, which you basically just light and wait to explode. So walking through the streets becomes precarious, because you might stumble upon a couple of 8-year-olds who’ve decided to ignite an explosive device in the middle of the road. That’s really not that bad; if a fuse is lit in your immediate path, you just wait for it to explode and then continue on your way. The thing that really drove me nuts was the fact that I couldn’t sleep at all. For three or four days kids on my block were waking up at 6 in the morning and lighting these things. At first I tried to sleep through it, but it’s hard to sleep when it sounds like civil war has erupted outside.
Divali seems a lot like Christmas, in the sense that it’s mostly about fun, and the religious part is only peripheral. I was lucky enough to get invited to a Divali pooja, which was a great experience. The Rupanis, a Hindu family whose daughter is a Bahá’í friend of mine, took me along to their factory on the outskirts of the city. Hindu poojas are sometimes done in the workplace. The Dasara festival which just passed, for example, entails blessing the tools (computers, notebooks, machinery, etc.) used by the employees. Every year Mr. Rupani’s employees gather at the factory for a Divali pooja conducted by a Hindu priest, after which he gives each of them a bonus.
From what I can tell, to invite a non-Hindu to something like this is pretty rare. The family I am living with, for instance, is very religious but has never invited me for any religious activity, even though they know I’m a Bahá’í, know that I learned about Hinduism in Sunday school as a kid, and know that I’m curious to learn more. The Rupanis, however, are liberal and uniquely open-minded. They really enjoy showing off the subtler cultural and religious parts of life here, for which I feel grateful.
I’m not going to describe every detail of the ceremony. I took a bunch of photos, which I posted here. But generally speaking, it really confirmed in my head how highly ritualized Hinduism is. A lot of rituals involve food. During this pooja, the Rupanis bathed a tiny statue of the goddess Lakhsmi in milk, honey, yogurt, dates, and probably something else that I’m forgetting. And fire is also used; it’s believed to have a cleansing, renewing effect (the Bahá’í writings symbolically refer to fire in a similar way). Sometimes you spin around counterclockwise, although I don’t know why. And sometimes you ring bells, which one person told me kills germs and tiny insects, a perfect example of the convergence of science, religion, and superstition that is common here. As this whole thing was being performed, the priest, a huge man with broad shoulders and fat fingers, chanted holy verses in Sanskrit. It was almost hypnotic. At one point I just closed my eyes and listened, and I think I could have attained a deeply meditative state if pain hadn’t been shooting down my legs from sitting cross legged for a whole hour.
A very quick video from the pooja is here.
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A few days ago I began writing a journal entry that I later decided not to post. The reason why is that I’d had a frustrating experience that day and was in a bad mood when I began to write. By the time I had finished, the entry was downright nasty. Below are the relatively sensible parts. I’ve added this just to shed some light on the fact that amid the fun and humor of living here there are also some aspects that are bothersome and in some cases painful. Plus, this entry clearly wasn’t long enough.
It’s taken a couple months, but I’m actually starting to feel comfortable here in Bangalore. I’ve figured out which foods to eat (khara bath… delicious) and which to avoid (rice bath… nearly killed me). I’ve kind of figured out what bothers or insults Indian people (feet) and what they tolerate well (crowds). I can take a bus without getting lost or nauseous. And I actually have a few friends not named Dell (I was pretty close to painting a face on my laptop and pretending it was a person, kind of like Tom Hanks did with his volleyball in Castaway).
For some reason or another, though, I wasn’t homesick until recently, even though I was totally clueless and culture shocked. Maybe I was too busy trying not to die. Or maybe I was just in shock… only a week or two ago did I stop dead in my tracks and think to myself, holy cow, I live in India…
…The single thing that still bugs me about my life in Bangalore is the way people talk to me. After all these weeks, I still haven’t figured out if the people around me are rude or just culturally different. I know the latter plays a part, I just don’t know how big a part. I’ve already talked about how pleasantries are scarce in conversation here. But here’s another example… in my office, if someone calls my name (or anyone else’s for that matter), that person expects me to stop the work I’m doing, walk over to his cubicle, and ask him what he wants. Now, this is downright insulting where I come from, but it’s clearly forgivable because it’s just a matter of different cultural expectations. But there are a number of other things that can’t be dismissed so easily. Sometimes I feel like I’m being scolded for something laughably trivial, as if I were a naughty child or pet. And other times people have said curious things about American society and culture, with attitudes hovering somewhere between ignorance and disdain, and all I can do is sit there confused because I can’t figure out the speaker’s underlying intentions. My solution in times like these is to speak with exaggerated courtesy, and to remind myself that I’m collecting great material for my online journal.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some important stuff to eat.