More from the voyage of learning

Continuing the theme of my last post on the most endearing things I encountered on my recent trip to India, I offer you now the 10 most infuriating things I encountered on my recent trip to the deep south of India:

10. Petty bureaucracy: Seemingly since individuals have very little control over various aspects of their lives, when they are put in positions of power, however trivial, they exercise the small amount of authority vested in them with an almost feudal vigor. A great example was a clothing store where I had taken my mother to get her a sari for her birthday. After picking the sari, you couldn't just pay for it. All the saris are shown to you by a sales clerk, who then hands the chosen sari to another guy, who walks with you to a cash counter where you pay for the sari. You would expect then that the sari would be handed to you. Not so much. They give you a receipt in 2 copies, which you then take to another counter where they examine the receipt carefully, tear off one copy and hand you the sari along with the receipt. On your way out, you hand the sari and the receipt to a guy at the door who examines the whole deal to make sure that you're not decamping with contraband. He then stamps the receipt and lets you out of the store with the sari. Any attempt to short-circuit this "make work" exercise is frowned upon.

9. Complete lack of civic responsibility: You need only to see people living in large homes surrounded by high fences dumping their garbage and refuse over the tops of their fences onto the street to get this. Another example is where little boys work at gas stations and garages for the express purpose of dumping used motor oil and lubricants at the street corner. The attitude is "Not in my backyard, but in my neighbor's front yard is just fine". The only truly authentic way to describe it in Hindi is "मेरा बाप का क्या जाता है"। ( Man, I just love this new Hindi transliteration capability in blogger. This is going to add so much more this blog. Even fewer people will read it now.)

8. The double standard: What's right for the goose is most certainly not right for the gander. Certain attitudes and activities are reserved for men. Women just cannot aspire to them. For example a frankly appraising glance at a member of the opposite sex is absolutely reserved for men. A woman who looks at a man in any way other a purely furtive glance risks being branded a harlot.

7. The status of women: While women seem to enjoy parity in the work place, at least in middle and lower-middle level jobs, and India was one of the first countries to have had a woman leader, women seem to be conspicuously absent from most the management teams of most large companies. Women entrepreneurs seem to be restricted to micro-businesses, and in employment seem to be restricted to traditional roles such as nurses, school teachers and ob-gyns.

6. 'Eve teasing': A innocent and somewhat romantic-sounding term unique to India, that hides a darker, more unpleasant truth. In this euphemism for harassment, hordes of young men grope, push and rub against women in buses, trains and other crowded public places, causing intolerable and unacceptable stress to young women. A young girl told me she decided to drop out of college some distance away from her home due the uninvited attentions of several 'roadside Romeos'. While in Italy it's not uncommon to find men leaning languorously on Vespas, making frankly appreciative comments about women passing by, they draw the line at physical molestation. And if the woman in question doesn't appreciate the wolf whistles, the Italians pack it in. The young college age Indian men see lack of enthusiasm for their advances as a challenge. Perhaps bred on a steady diet of Bollywood movies where all it takes is a couple of songs to turn the heroine's anger and disgust into undying love for the hero, they ratchet up the level of harassment to frankly appalling levels.

5. Driving habits: You realize the true horror of Indian driving habits only when you are traveling on an Indian highway in a car (which from the quality of the ride appears to have square wheels) that's approaching 3 oncoming vehicles, only one of which is on its own side of the road. The oncoming bus is being passed on a blind corner by another bus, which in turn is being passed by a large truck and they are all hurtling at you 3 abreast with their headlights and all manner of auxiliary lights on. So what does your driver do? Get off the pavement onto the shoulder and allow these suicidal lunatics to go past? Hell no. What kind of man would he be if he did that? This is clearly a call to arms. So he turns his headlights on high beam, leans on the horn and continues to barrel straight at the oncoming vehicles in this high stakes game of chicken. These contests of manhood are not resolved in the same way on every occasion. Sometimes the outermost oncoming vehicle decides at the last minute to hang back a little allowing enough room for the three others to just squeak by. Sometimes your driver loses his nerve and goes off the road onto the shoulder, waving his fists and making lurid suggestions about the sexual practices of the other drivers' mothers and sisters. In either case, you would be needing a change of underwear about now.

4. The obsession with lighter complexions: Perhaps as a result of hundreds of years of colonization (first the Mughals from Central Asia ruled India for 250 years from 1525 to 1775 and then the British ruled for a further 200 years until 1947) by light-skinned foreigners who were always in positions of authority, caused the average Indian to prize the lighter complexion. But the emphasis on the desirability of a 'fair' complexion is bordering on the ridiculous. Skin lightening products have created a $140 Million market and matrimonial ads in the papers and on internet marriage sites asking for and offering "fair" brides abound. There is change on the way with more successful dark-skinned Bollywood actresses, but it's far too gradual. The common man (and woman) still thinks lighter complexions are prettier.

3. A strong anti-American sentiment coupled with a desire to migrate there: It would be an extremely rare social gathering in India where the topic does not eventually turn to the war in Iraq or American politics. Inevitably at these times, the popular response from the whisky- soaked guests is either a disparaging remark about the bumptious Americans, or a George Bush joke illustrating just how clueless the 43rd President is. Admittedly, the President doesn't do himself any favors and has been providing rich fodder for comedians the world over since his first inauguration. But what makes this contempt for America and things American, more puzzling is that every middle class family has at least one child (sometimes every child) in the United States, who is pointed to with great pride. India accounts for the largest number of foreign students admitted to American Universities each year. In the immortal words of Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware,"you can't go into Dunkin Donuts or a 7-11 if you don't have a slight Indian accent". Seemingly the same rule applies to Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Yale, MIT and Stanford. So why the contempt?

2. Flies: They are the most ubiquitous creatures and are to be found equally plentifully on the piles of garbage piled on street corners as they are on sweets and candies in roadside stalls. They fill me with dread every time I see them swarming around food, and I can imagine myself contracting some particularly virulent form of hemorrhagic fever. Enough said.

1. Mosquitoes: Having donated many pints of my blood to the swarms of mosquitoes that invade Indian homes every night, I should now be on fairly congenial terms with them. But I am not. When I awoke on the second morning in India with my face and head covered in hundreds of angry red bumps, my heart lurched sickeningly and visions of small pox isolation wards came unbidden to my mind. Pulling up my T-shirt and examining my chest and stomach closely, and finding no bumps convinced me that these were indeed evidence of the nocturnal visitations of my buzzing nemeses. My horror at the viral fevers spread by these critters and the casual way in which people in India refer to a recent bout of such a mosquito-borne illness called Chikungunya, causes this to be ranked the #1 most infuriating thing I encountered in India.

A voyage of learning and understanding

And I'm back. The trip to India, despite my trepidations turned out to be better than I had anticipated. Visiting the place of my birth after an absence of nearly 35 years was interesting, informative and revealing. The warmth of the people and their unquestioning acceptance of ways they probably thought were weird, was complete.

The travel itself was wearying. When I actually did the calculation, I was somewhat dismayed to discover that the door-to-door travel time, from leaving my home in Boulder, Colorado to entering my mother's house in the deep south of India took an eye watering 40 hours of elapsed time.

When I got back my friends badgered me over beers as to the things I found most changed, the most intriguing, the most infuriating and most endearing about the country and its people. So I thought I would share my thoughts in that regard:

The 10 most endearing things I encountered:

10. The 'wag' of the head, a uniquely Indian body expression, meaning 'I agree' or 'OK', where it is neither a nod nor a headshake.
9. People wanting to do things for you - like carry your suitcase or open doors for you
8. Everyone wants to feed you. If you're visiting you must eat. Or you must drink tea or coffee. How people remain relatively slim with all this eating is beyond me.
7. The incredible food. After the first few meals at the homes of relatives I visited, I stopped complaining that I had just eaten lunch. The food was so good, that if they wanted to feed me lunch twice, who was I to object?
6. People get offended if you thank them. They see expressions of thanks as 'formality' and are offended that you're treating them as you would a stranger.
5. The "We'll adjust somehow" attitude. In the face of daunting adversity people find it in their hearts to be charitable and accommodating to others. A bus may be full beyond its designed capacity, with people hanging on to every possible protuberance of the vehicle (including the roof) but there's always room for one more passenger and his stuff.
4. The attitude towards animals. Domestic animals and strays alike are treated with such acceptance that goats, cows, dogs and chickens wander through village and small town streets without any fear of harm. Traffic stops to let them pass and moves on.
3. The cleanliness of small villages. Be they however poor, everyone seems to freshly showered and changed in the morning often with wet hair, and the outside of the homes are freshly sprinkled with water and a design with rice flour (to feed the ants) is made on the doorstep.
2. The love of music. Every street corner seems to have a little tea shop that plays music loudly seemingly to attract customers. From devotional songs early in the morning to popular film music through the day, the radio falls silent only when the shop closes for the night at 11:00.
1. The smiles. From shy schoolgirls smiling behind henna'd fingers to the toothless grin of the grizzled farm hand, everyone seems to be smiling all the time. And it's not the rictus of forced mirth. It's the open smile of welcome, of hope and just pure happiness.

Not everything is sweetness and light however. My next post shall be about the most infuriating things I encountered.

Back to the roots

I leave tomorrow for a week's sojourn to the land of my birth - actually the very place of my birth. All those many years ago, families of a certain middle-class (some may say bourgeois) sensibility in small-town India would rarely have their children born in a hospital or nursing home. The event would usually occur at home attended by a mid-wife and the female relatives of the pregnant woman.

When my mother was carrying me, it was just such a scenario that caused me to be born in a special birthing room in my grandfather's house deep in South India. This room has seen the birth of many of my cousins and some of their own children as well, and is now used as a spare room. My uncle's family lives in the house now and many of the things I remember from childhood visits to this house in the late 50s and 60s have remained.

This weekend, I travel to India to attend my mother's birthday - she turns 80 next week and what more fitting tribute can I pay than to be present to record her crossing that momentous milestone?

I approach this trip with some trepidation. Trips to India are (at least for me) fraught with tension. You cannot possibly visit all the relatives in the time you have. How do you make the choice of which ones to see? How do you appease the ones you don't see? What gifts are approriate for people you haven't seen in 30 years?

You have no idea of their interests, or likes or dislikes. Or even of their physical size. What are age and gender-appropriate gifts half a world and whole planet away? Does this toy look cheap? Is this top too immodest for a high school girl?

How do you maintain some semblance of a healthy diet when everyone insists on forcing rich sweets and desserts down your throat? How does someone who drinks neither coffee not tea politely refuse the profferred drinks at each visit, without throwing your hosts in to a welter of confusion?

When I return in a week, I may be none the wiser on these and other imponderables, but I will at least have the trip behind me.