“There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, reinvented, made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether or not we use them. Bombs will destroy us either way.” The End of Imagination, 1998, Arundhati Roy


--

This morning I want my words to cry, my sadness to run down these pages, scrolling through an intense, disillusioning, consuming despair. I want the reflection of this monitor to show my vapid eyes, an overcome expression. I want this unfeeling machine to implode from the intensity of the emotions bleeding through my tapping, typing, fingertips. We woke this morning or we went to sleep this evening in a murderous world, a world of hate, killing. Assassination.

Pictures of her coffin. Ensuing riots. Outrage. Chaos. Speculation about what went wrong, how this was allowed to happen, what will happen now in an already tumultuous political climate. Graphic designers walk us through her final steps. Elections on January 8th. Nuclear security. Photos of her life. Terrorism. Extremists. Condolences and apologies, promises for investigation, public condemnations, vows of vengeance, blame.
If there are ever, I do not know, but today there surely are no sufficient words of consolation. Interrogations might find out who planned this attack, but they can’t tell us how much bad there is in the world. We know. We’ve just witnessed.

No energy for this. Exhausted. A moment that makes you believe in nothing.

Alex asked me about things in Pakistan. I hadn’t checked the news. I told him it was just politics as usual, thinking she were still alive and that he was referring to the approaching elections, political posturing, power hungry dictator. I checked the newspaper and was uppercut by a heavyweight headline.

Dead.

My knees wobbling, already in the 8th round of a title bout against Holiday Time Homesickness, I smashed against the canvas, not out for the count, but infected with a feeling that will take a day to pass. This hit landed before the bell, below the belt.
I never met Benazir Bhutto. I am not from Pakistan. People are murdered all the time. In large numbers people die tragic deaths. Yet something about watching that web page load screamed into my soul of a world so sick, so wrong, so polluted that today I want to disengage, to refuse this world, to fold my hand, to be 7, to be lied to and told that everything will be ok.

That groups -- groups made of human beings -- are competing to take claim for killing her. That most of my colleagues flip past this news to the “year in films lookback, the 25 most influential Bollywood films of the year” (can there be 25 most influential films in a year?). What is going on in the world when people compete for credit of an assassination? What is really going on in the world when this doesn’t phase people? That that man stood in the crowd with explosives strapped to his body and a sense of duty or right-doing planted in his mind, the goal of killing her and as many others as possible, maybe in the name of god, that somehow this action was justifiable, or right, that he pulled the trigger.

Today I want my words to cry.

Child Labor on the 18th Green

“I work outside for nine months a year as a construction laborer and survive on daily wages. Going to vote means loss of three days of wages and an expenditure of Rs. 350. How can I afford that when I am not sure where my next meal will come from?” Varsinbhai, a worker quoted in The Indian Express, December 16, 2007, when asked if he was going to vote in the state-wide elections

--

This was the last place I expected to play golf. India, the land of 1.2 billion, the Mahatma, Taj Mahal, non alignment, the third highest number of HIV/AIDS affected persons in the world, spices, Bengal tigers, countless languages, yoga, caste, the hundreds of millions of rural poor, weddings, saris, the Kama Sutra. Going to Scotland, the home of golf, it made sense. Here, it just wasn’t in my mind; the first -- and second -- set of associations of India, its culture, tourist destinations, non tourist destinations, likely don’t involve golf and for most people here life and golf rarely meet. What’s golf? Few know and fewer play. But, this morning I saw the face of the 7, 8, 9, 10 percent growth rate investors in the West fawn over, of the relatively small but growing (in number and in wealth) urban upper class, of ‘development’ and its dumbfounding complexity.

It is winter in Ahmedabad and it’s cold. Before and after the sun, shawls make nocturnal appearances, caps come out and this is not the kind of weather that makes you want to wake up. Momma pajama doesn’t jump out of bed, let alone at 7 a.m. on a Sunday. It was more like a roll, stirring only at the second alarm and even then wondering if it wasn’t too late to make the call – I am just too tired, sorry. No shower, quick transition from pajamas to pants, switch the shirts, glasses no contacts, jacket and into the elevator.

My fault for being on time; I wait. Rahul pulls up half an hour late. Since arriving, he has been the most gracious of hosts in his city, welcoming me warmly, inviting me to family events, giving me shirts, always asking if there is anything I need or that he can do. He is going to lend me a blanket. Twenty four, he and his older brother work at the textile company started by their father. In time, it will be theirs. They own 4 cars; conspicuously on the dashboard are his Burberry sunglasses. Golf clubs on the back seat. Digging in his pocket, he takes out and answers his iPhone. Their company survived the decline of the textile industry in Ahmedabad and they are surviving well.

Ahmedabad is growing and it is growing fast. It is growing out, not up, without a plan, in concentric circles of mega malls, cinemas, office parks and 10-story apartment compounds. Residents who grew up here no longer know when the city starts and when it ends, the landmarks they once referenced gone, parks for an ice cream on a Sunday subsumed in the belly of the beast, remodeled, renovated, now a hotel or a parking lot. Two-year-old malls, with only half of the shops rented, cower in the shadow of the newer, bigger, brighter mall going up immediately next door.

Behind both those malls and every construction project in the city are the shanty towns where the men, women and children who do the work live. Following the construction like the harvest, they live where there is work, unskilled, cheap to hire and easy to fire. They don’t shop at these malls and they don’t play golf. On their backs buildings and profit-margins are built. Developers want their projects up as fast as possible, money is the end goal. The demand for developments is high, the demand for labor is high and cheap labor is the best kind. Respect, fair pay, the legal working day are absent. Labor laws exist and NGOs scramble to keep up, but the pace of growth is too fast.

“Do you like Ace of Base?” Rahul asks. Sure. I don’t see any signs, but the roads are smooth, two lanes going in each direction, divided by a concrete wall, street lamps every 30 feet. Long haul trucks zoom by, delivering the concrete that will build the malls. For these truck drivers, the roads are good. The roads are good for the person they are rushing to meet. For the worker who is following the cement delivery, the roads are good. Easier on the hooves than a rocky, dusty, potholed, uneven road, the camels and elephants also appreciate this road. It is faster and easier to ride a bike, push a lorry and drive a car, motorbike, rickshaw, or donkey on a smooth road. Potholes help no one. Roads that do what roads are meant to do are really helpful.

Without that road it would have taken us two hours to get to the golf club. Instead, it takes 40 minutes. We take a left turn into the gate and are greeted by two men in uniforms and crisp salutes. They look like toy soldiers. This is not Westminster. They are not actually soldiers, they are cold. But, the boss obviously told them every car that comes and goes must be met by a crisp salute. He probably holds an MBA and this is the business culture he is going to create in his club, how he is going to increase brand equity and establish a strong reputation, the guard is the first and last thing members will see, what they will remember.

Construction is still going. When it is ready, Rahul tells me, this will be the most happening, exclusive club in the city. The driving range, club shop, Tee Off Café are complete; the course, clubhouse, pool, two restaurants, tennis courts, track and gym are still being built. Some of the landscaping is done, some fixtures have light bulbs, some merchandise is stocked.

Immediately upon parking – we are going to build our reputation on service -- two boys open the car doors. In t-shirts made in Mexico during the mid 90s, sold in the US, used for a year, donated to the Salvation Army and barged to India, they’ve been cast as Bellhop 1 and Bellhop 2. No starch, no uniform, no khakis. This Sunday is not their day off from school – they don’t go to school; mom is sweeping the steps and dad is climbing the scaffolding of the clubhouse. They are good boys and do their best to play the part. One of them awkwardly removes the golf bag from the back seat and slings it on his right shoulder, walking to the driving range on his tip toes. The bag is taller than he is. The other boy stares at me, blinded by the light.

Rahul drops his membership number nonchalantly and we saunter in, shoulders back, head high, looking around a little, stopping in the shop never with the intention to buy. He’s got the walk down. At the club.

His golf game is not as good as his walk. In fact, he can’t hit the ball. Visibly embarrassed, he takes his time in between swings. He is a beginner with really nice equipment. His clubs are from the US, a friend of his from school working in Chicago brought them home from his last business trip. Swooping to the rescue, the golf pro comes over. Now Rahul just looks like he is having a lesson, working on his game. Saved. His shirt is from Ralph Lauren, new, not the Salvation Army, but he too is playing his part.

In between swings, a woman reaches with a broom to wipe cobwebs from the rafters. Some of the staff stop working and stare. Snapped at the waist, their knees locked, women pick weeds from the landscaping. Off to the right the clubhouse is being built, ensconced in bamboo scaffolding and catwalking workers, a poured concrete skeleton, a Frankenstein of exclusivity that will soon be finished with oak panels and big egos, handshakes, bets, and gentlemen’s agreements.

Fifty balls later, we walk the walk and have breakfast at the café. Rahul’s phone rings, he answers, and two minutes later we are joined by a man with a pointed, scrupulously waxed moustache. It is his trademark and the trademark of many others from military homes. His father is a hot shot in the Army, a man with a moustache and public appearance of starched uniform, shadowed, glassy eyes, and expression of Spartan duty. Privately, behind the walls of the Army club -- a club only high ranking officials are allowed to join -- he is a different kind of man, a whiskey drinking, gambling man looking after his own interests. The one constant, public and private, are the orders he gives. Rahul belongs to this golf club and the mustached man belongs to his father’s. They want what the other has.

We finish eating and bullshit our way to the practice bunker, strolling, making sure the trees see us, our hands in our pockets. It is supposed to be sand. It’s not. It is a mud pit. Two young men are working on their short game, their crisp, new, white Nike sneakers muddy, no longer as white as their crisp, new, white Nike golf caps. Tots in the sandbox, they just hack away, mud going farther than the ball. “Hey yaar, you can’t touch the sand before your shot,” one tells the other in impeccable boarding school English. His friend doesn’t like being coached, contemplates the advice for half a second, shrugs his shoulders, and goes right back to punishing his clubs.

Short phrases, whispers, pats on the back, discretion, favors, the charade of importance.

Off to the side, leaning casually on a pitching wedge, moustache man walks Rahul through the policy of ‘introduction’ at the Army club.

See, even though I am not in the army, I gain my father’s membership. No one, absolutely no one who is not from a military family can get membership to this club. Wishing he were Bond, he takes a long, dramatic drag on this imaginary cigar. Unless, of course, I introduce you and my father makes a phone call.

A break in the action for a couple of swings. You have these two introductions, now it is just a matter of formality, paperwork, etc. Don’t worry.

Hundreds of thousands of rupees will change hands.

Ready with his touché, Rahul politely thanks him for all the trouble, adequately patting the moustache’s ego, then begins. I’ve been talking to my friend here and he is going to give me the membership forms this week. When I get them I will give them to you. He’s agreed to the discount.

Rahul’s father is one of the most esteemed members at a different club in Ahmedabad. The man who owns that club is opening this golf club and agreed to give the waxed moustache a Rs. 50,000 discount as a favor to Rahul’s family.

Go right here, then left, and just before that roundabout near the Reliance Supermarket take another left – our office is the pink building on the right. It’s easy to find.

There are no street signs. This is normal. Giving directions is not easy and things are not easy to find.

If you get lost or need directions just call. Great. Call you next week.

Still in the mud pit, the two young men continue to hit balls out of the bunker. When they are finished, they chip them back into the bunker, and then do it all over again. The man with the moustache joins them. In between shots he talks to me about his friends in Jackson Heights. We trade formalities. I am working for an NGO here that does sewage worker organizing. Great; I did my schooling in social work, specializing in rural and urban development but now I run a security company. He bashes a ball. It flies out of the bunker and onto the putting green, barely missing the man and his son practicing there. They are standing in the direct line of where he is hitting and he is not holding back, again and again bashing the balls like grapefruits and cantaloupes, vengeful, punishing, rapid fire right at this man and his son. They putt on.

He tells me he just wasn’t cut out for it. You don’t say.

Rahul and I head out. No one is at the driving range at the moment. Two boys scamper around collecting balls.

--

Growth is not inevitable; growth and ‘development’ are the results of policies, of business, currency, markets, speculation, government, investment, intentions good and bad, selfish and selfless, nationalistic and humanitarian, tariffs, trade agreements, acquisitions, loans. Capitalism demands growth but it doesn’t demand how that growth happens, it is guided, steered, and controlled by the decisions of real people, real people with hearts, children, families, reputations, ambitions, careers, hobbies, dreams, boards, stock packages, interests. The influential are influenced by human concerns the same way we all are None of this is inevitable.Their decisions affect real people.

This golf course is proof of the very difficult task of counting in the billions and trillions and not loosing people, at any level, to the system. It shoes that we have far to go in how we think about and do ‘development,’ that India’s growth rates are helping few, failing most, and lacking nuance. India’s growth is not considering the people or how it grows, it is focusing on the easy part of building buildings and roads with temperate success, ignoring the hard part and failing.

India is playing the game without the etiquette.

Technocratic schemes are easy to cook up on paper but they don’t work unless they consider the reality of the ground, the people they will most impact and it is by these people that these programs ought to be judged. Building private golf clubs and shopping malls is not ‘advancement’ (ever?) when they are built by displaced, homeless, illiterate, tribal laborers. Child labor on the putting green is not a success.

Human indicators are the ones that matter most and by these metrics India is failing.

The importation of Western values on exactly this topic is creating a critical mass of affluence that cares about nothing but indicators of their own wealth. Actors playing a part. Men who act as they think they should, as their Western business colleagues do, but have no idea what they are doing. The influential easily influenced, in power but not in control of the values they are driving their country towards, a dangerous materialism and inequity implanted in their minds as a just end goal. A proliferation of MBAs who want to build brand equity while employing illiterate middle age men as security guards. Business deals on the golf course. At the club on a Sunday. Desires to be Western, iPhones, but still way behind, Ace of Base blaring. Mud pits. Men who have studied the problems, are aware of them, but have been coached into a preferred lifestyle, not cut out for it.

There is no effective coordination at any level, no sense of equity, a variety of different actors playing towards the same hole but unconcerned with the other actors on the course, swinging away in their interest. Maybe the economic indicators are improving, for a few, but the social ones are not. Some of the roads are getting better, some jobs are being created, but the upper class urban elite, comfortable behind their gates, in their clubs and A/C cars, the face of the booming India the West adores, doesn’t care about the people they’ve left in the wake of capitalism’s growth, become more ‘developed’ than.

Be Exceptional

“You decide to venture from the sanctity of your tropical compound. You see natives. You marvel at the things they can do with their hair. The things they fashion out of cheap twine or ordinary cloth. Squatting on the side of the road. Hanging out with all the time in the world. You might look at them and think: “They’re so relaxed, so laid-back, they’re never in a hurry.

Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives – most natives in the world- cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the realities of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go – so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.” -- Jamaica Kincaid, “A Small Place”

--

Sunday concluded a three-day impact assessment. I am glad that it is over, I don’t like working on Saturdays and I definitely don’t like working on Sundays. Tiring, this trip let me taste something, see the term ‘sewage worker’ with my nose, understand the work we are doing in a lived way.

For three days we sat and talked about our work, went to the field to see it, to talk with the stakeholders, the people to whom the funding is supposed to go, the communities on the ground, the marginalized communities, low-caste. In a proposal, “empowerment” is a prerequisite – it must be mentioned. It can be linked to women or community or the veritable individual (women’s empowerment, community empowerment, individual empowerment), but regardless of who it is that is empowered, someone is going to get empowered. Saturday was not a proposal; I saw it. Empowerment is taking place here.

She stood up, her shoulders back, her head held high and when she spoke, people listened. Her sari was worn thin, cotton, not the warmer silk that would be worn for this colder weather. From where I sat her hair looked like a brand new record, the sun shinning in a round reflection that hugged the shape of her skull, her perfect part the first track of many songs of fine, jet black hair. With motions to rival even the most over exaggerated Italian stereotype, she spoke, conducting her discordant symphony. Nothing in her words was rehearsed, nothing about her was reserved, this was not a speech but a testament, a dictated autobiography, the cadence of her speech mesmerizing. Her body supported her, not sad, but a verification, the wrinkles in her face telling of the long days, the scars on her ankles, callous hands, tough feet.

She is pissed. She doesn’t cry, there is no sorrow, just anger. She lives what development literature tries, and constantly fails, to communicate.

Crescendo. She concludes with an ending that wins filmmakers awards and writers acclaim. Except this is real. Slowly, the reality of her words and the power with which they were spoken sinking in, she turns to the NGO assessor who is listening intently, with a mask of grave concern, sympathetic. “What do I do? Tell me what do to?” Using the most polite Hindi conjugation: “Boliye (please tell me).”

Overmatched, the NGO woman does her best, regurgitating what she would say; “You’ve started, you are empowered, you are thinking differently, here today, fighting for what’s yours, your rights.”

In that instant, this is an impressively impotent response, a pale of water to extinguish a forest fire.

For that woman to stand up and demand her rights is exceptional – it is not the norm. Why would she stand up? What is in it for her? Her liberation? Maybe. In the short term, to do so is likely not in her interest. The system is slow to change. Empowered women look good in the glossy pages of NGO brochures but often times they are not well received by husbands and bosses and there is a probability that some sort of violence will be committed against her.

With everything stacked against her, she refuses to relent for some reason beyond the improbable wage increase of 40 rupees a day to 70 rupees a day - $1 to $1.75. Maybe she believes in the world, in people, a better future for her children. No longer will she swallow her words. It is not easy, but she stands up for her rights.

Friends, family, people I know care for me very deeply and write only out of love, tell me to take it easy, that I am being too hard on myself.

I am not that woman, but she asks a very important and hard to answer question: What would it take for me to do something exceptional? For you to do something exceptional?

We often hear or read stories like this in the national media, color features recounting the work of individuals with remarkable personal constitutions and commitment to change despite the ubiquity of destitution in their lives. Women’s groups. Micro credit schemes. Former child soldiers. Community based organizations. Survivors of genocide. Peace activists. Surviving orphans. A clinic. Sewage workers. This woman.

Sitting in the living room with a full stomach, the heat working, the kids home from college, cars in the garage, Muppet curled up by the fire, it is easy to hear stories like this and feel overwhelmed, outmatched by such courage, that nothing we do in our sterile world can be as gutsy as that woman, as exceptional as these amazing stories in the national media, as people who choose to believe in something when everything in their world tells them not to.

But, we are not that lady, we don’t carry shit on our heads for a living. We have it much easier. We don’t need her courage to make change. We need our courage.

It is not enough for us only to think differently or to be empowered. We are thinking differently, we’ve taken the classes, read the articles, been to the lectures, studied this inside and out – for us, it is about how we act. Think of what America and its citizens communicate with their bodies, cars, policies, consumer choices, think of what it means to be not-exceptional. Think of the excuses you make for not acting. The messages are spurious. We are aware of the dangers of climate change, of the racism endemic to our country, crumbling inner cities and impoverished rural areas, murderous foreign policy, global poverty, unjust wealth distribution, a deplorable public school system, ills that have settled into normalcy as a result of political apathy, a delinquent White House, and cutthroat capitalism. For us, it is time to move beyond thinking and to act differently

That we don’t carry shit on our heads is a good thing - it is not something to feel embarrassed about and the good fortune of our global positioning should not diminish your contribution. From that living room, with the fire still warm, we have the power to make great change – at a different level but part of the same solution – and we face the fewest risks.

But, don’t offer a pale to this forest fire - it must be exceptional action. It is time to look at the norms and rise above them, to take offense at the polluting, apathetic course that is expected of you and surpass the expectation that you will continue living in a world of violence, hate, a world where billions of people live on less than $2 a day, where 40,000 people die each day of preventable diseases, where 2 million Americans are incarcerated, children die of diarrhea, where we have enough food to feed the world and greed handcuffs us. The negative examples abound. You need to be a positive one.

This might sound preachy, but so too do those emails. Look around. Don’t tell me that I am being too hard on myself. Are you being hard enough?

Give money, ride your bike, change your lifestyle, think of the jobs you take and consider more than money, understand where and with whom you hang out, write a letter, volunteer, defy the norms in actions small and large but in actions all the time. Be exceptional by doing exactly what is not expected of you, doing what the world needs. Think of this woman and think of the questions she asks you in your life.
What will it mean to be exceptional? If she can stand up, surely so can we.

“The problem with a rat race is that even if you win you are still a rat.” -Lily Tomlin

I don’t know. A bad stand up comedian returning to his punch line again and again: I don’t know. I don’t. Crickets. Sometimes you are going to bomb, and right now it feels like the bottom’s fallen out. Nothing’s clear, no answers, just uncertainty. Questions that beget questions that lead only to the surrender of shrugged shoulders, dejection, and feelings of total confusion; I don’t know. At the bottom of the year-abroad curve, I look forward often.

My boogers are black. People offer me cigarettes and I tell them: “No thank you, I’ve already been outside today.” Ahmedabad is home to the most polluted air out of all cities in India – illustrious company. Foods are starting to taste the same. Traffic is mad; my fits of bike rage returned. Gujarat is a dry state, doubly dry when you consider the prospects of meeting women, triply dry when you recall the weather. The task of communication is grinding, I still pantomime and over enunciate my way through simple conversations. Cars, bikes, buses, trucks, motorbikes, and rickshaws honk and honk and honk. I wonder why I feel so homesick, why I feel that I’ve been away for so long. This is the only question I can answer for sure: because I have. I left NYC on August 11 and it feels like it.

There is a partner on this seesaw. Bright colors and delicious tea. Wonderful smiles, strong families, gracious hospitality, foods that are delicious and don’t taste the same, yoga, an exhilarating history of legend and lore alive in the streets and buildings, fresh fruit, old men in the park, ice cream, monkeys, week-long weddings, my new room, Bollywood films, a state holiday kite festival, and dozens of other details that sit at the other end of the plank, pushing down to pick me up, and sometimes disappearing in plain sight, Purloined Letters, watching me fall.

But shitty air and beautiful women are symptoms, they are not what really troubles me, telltales that something deeper is awry. Kiwis, working in translation, and papayas reflect a confounded moral compass that is under attack, emaciated by a lack of familiar nourishment, perplexed by questions from a new world, disorienting weaponry that destroys reference points and leaves me in need of recalibration. Small events probe and burrow, adding up to big questions that I do and do not understand, questions that, when explored, leave no sure answer. I stare in the mirror at uncertainty. I don’t know.

My mind is numb, underwhelmed with work, this city, the people, the monotony. This is a massive change, something I hate, and try all the time to remedy but it takes a lot of energy to meet new people, to initiate, be the new guy – especially when you don’t understand anything – that I sometimes concede defeat, sit and read. I do know people, I have friends, there is cool work going on in Ahmedabad, but not in my office. Most of my time is spent in a chair at a desk looking at a computer. There are some projects that I am cooking up, but there is no buzz among the staff, no pep, no scrambling, over-committed excitement, no energetic frenzy that excites, no team that you want to be a part of. Could be that I don’t understand these things when they are expressed, I don’t understand all the time, but it is not a working environment I like, am used to, or allow myself to grow comfortable in.

All the time I feel misunderstood; friends and co workers don’t really understand how to get my mind firing, and when it is firing they offer little oxygen. I am never at full speed, never totally loose, always speak slowly, rarely curse, sedate. Never before have I been in a more different place and never before have I felt so medicated; some sort of charade is constantly maintained. When I do hang out with someone who I think might get me I end up going overboard, overwhelming him/her with what’s been pent up.

I miss friends and family who know me, who are smart in my language, who push back, spar, offer something new and different, tell me to stop being an idiot, tell me that I’ve guessed right, that I can work with, that have something to contribute. I miss my comfort zone, bike rides, salad, NYC, my brother, BC, stupid nights, stupid jokes, flirting, sweaters, dancing, dark beer, the possibility of meeting new, engaging, exciting people, pasta, UNC, not having to work, basketball. I look forward.

To what?

What do I want to do next? What is important to me? Why am I here? How do I want to live my life? What makes me happy? How do I want to be in the world?

Each time I think I have an answer to any of these questions I stop myself before I can finish my thought, interrupted in my mind by the counterpoint that springs up and sounds equally right. Counterpoint after counterpoint, I don’t know.

Supposedly I came to India to work at the grassroots level, at the forefront of human rights advocacy, to partner with an NGO serving as the interface between the most marginalized communities and the services, laws, and rights that they are entitled to. Lila Watson’s quote [“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together.”]
tells me that I am not here to help. Somehow, wearing my white skin, a foot taller than everyone and without language skills my presence is to supposed to defy the power dynamics of North/South, Rich/Poor, 3rd/1st and be ‘fair.’ This program hopes that I work and talk with, not at, the flow of information is supposed to go both ways, honest communication, mutual learning, skills transfer, thoughts of sustainability, capacity building. In training we talked about cultural sensitivity, American attitudes, socio political climates, histories that set the tone today, values, morals, sympathy, empathy, body language, norms, conscientious consumerism, the importance of patience, understandings of time, control, ownership, dress, nonverbal messages.

We ran the gamut of development practitioner basics to create young adults with the skills, knowledge, and awareness to operate in this mutually benefiting space that ‘good’ models suggest.

Right now, this all feels like total bullshit. From where I sit, any and all ideas of development are a fantastic fairy tale. Talk of advocacy, organizing, rallying for Dalit rights has been happening in India for over a hundred years. It is India and it isn’t. Substitute any issue – AIDS, poverty, domestic violence, malnutrition, sex trafficking, potable water, aboriginal rights, indigenous rights, ethnic tensions, peace and reconciliation, disaster relief, race relations, displaced persons, genetically modified crops, asthma, obesity, starvation, heart disease, health care, TB, malaria, illiteracy, child slavery, civil war, malnourishment, housing -- at any level – community, city, state, national, international, global - and the same gap between lip service and results exists. Admitted: these issues persist because they are so complex and hard to solve. There are no easy solutions or quick fixes. But, at any level, the impacts pale in comparison to the money, time, attention spent trying to remedy whatever the stated need is. The resultant rat race is a system, a beast, created by best intentions that is as unfair, unresponsive, political, and inefficient as the unfair, bureaucratic, inefficient system it was created to fix.

People still carry shit on their head. Pick an issue, fill in the blank, the need is there and the system sucks.

Human history has never known more material wealth. Billions of people live on less than $2 a day. Each day tens of thousands of people die of preventable diseases. Disparity, by any indicator, between rich and poor has never been as great. How do we know this? Some NGO did years of research, paying exorbitant bribes and salaries, to find out the problems. Using their figures another NGO did research on how best to reduce these problems. Then another NGO wrote a proposal, vetted by an NGO consulting NGO, for funding for community work to reduce said problem. Another NGO attacked them for a wrong model. A different NGO did work on the harm caused by the original intervention. Another NGO was hired to conduct an assessment of their work. More research on the changed, emerging new face of the same problem. People still carry shit on their head.

Looking out from the eye of the storm, this development beast looks like a downright stupid proliferation of NGOs, NGOs that help NGOs, NGO’s that really are governmental bodies (organizations that have become exactly what they hope to reverse), consultants, models, papers, academics, competition for funding, conferences, workshops, trainings, meetings, summits, World Days, awards, honors, fellowships, grants, support, photo essays, empowering projects, films, documentaries, photographs.

The big houses drive around in Land Rovers, A/C blasting. Small NGOs sprout up like flowers in the April, each organization is staffed by people who care, will be that much closer to the frontline, better, more local, more fair, more participatory in its development model, more focused on involving women, locally staffed and better able to address the needs of the people by the people. Everyone you meet is working with an NGO on these same, vague issues of community development with the most marginalized, the most downtrodden, the lowest. It doesn’t count unless they are really marginalized.

Awards scramble to keep up with these social entrepreneurs, global citizens, people of the year, leaders of the future. First the Nobel Prize to award outstanding accomplishment. Now, the X Prize, Rolex, Ashoka, Macarthur, Echoing Green… universities and corporations affiliate their names.

Let’s be honest for a second: my liberation is not bound up in yours. I don’t carry shit on my head. The thought of a common humanity that unites the world, stops our destruction of the Earth, feeds, clothes, shelters, provides medical treatment and safety to each and every person in the world is a powerful, right idea. NGOs don’t work with me. I am not the member of a marginalized community. I am liberated. My life is far more impacting on the Earth than it should be, but according to most of the key socio-economic indicators, I am where billions of people want to be. Equitable change will take sacrifice from my global bracket and we are connected, but that is a tangential connection. If my liberation is bound up in yours we are talking about a very different kind of liberation. Do we quote Lila Watson because we agree with her or because it makes us feel good? How do our actions answer this question?

Most people do as much as they need to feel good and as little as they can to be helpful. Paul Farmer calls these people White Liberals. Photos holding starving children. International volunteer trips. Volunteer cores. Me. Mission trips. Sighs of sympathy. They mean well. But, good-intentionsare not enough. Watson’s words are all over dorm rooms and profiles, t shirts and posters. Millions of people have read Mountains Beyond Mountains. These are the same people who work at NGOs. They are good people, they mean well, they have good intentions. But, so what? What does that poster on the wall mean to the person who’s liberation hangs in the balance.

I don’t know. Yet, I am here. I am not taking pot shots from afar, for reasons that are stronger that my disdain for the nonsense of the NGO world I am here, trying to answer these questions. Looking around makes me wonder if this was a good decision. Thinking of the world and just how fucked things sometimes seem, the wholly inadequate responses we well-intentioned actors muster, the stupidity of non governmental posturing, I am skeptical. So too is there so much beauty, love, support, hope, and success. Still I wonder: is the urge to help helpful? Is the desire to ‘help’ entirely self indulgent and disconnected from the sacrifice required to maybe make a difference. A coached impulse that quells some inner discomfort, some perceived injustice, a wrong. Where does this come from? How does one make a difference, how do you know? Can you change the world or can you change the people you meet, control what you can control, be in the world how you want to be.

Next year I am going to move to New York City, be near my family, interesting people I can speak with, bike rides and adventures, friends, comfort. I want to do what makes me happy. The world is fucked, let’s admit it. The problems are not going anywhere. I know I need a job but I don’t need a career. Each morning I want to wake up excited for the day, my work, my play, them being the same thing, my partner, my location. My liberation is bound up in my liberation. You are only young once and now is the time to do what you love. Maybe.

Do I have the courage to take my own advice? I give it quite often, to friends deliberating between grad school and something cooler and less orthodox. Do what you love, now is your time I tell them. What will I do?

That stupid impulse to help, work with – whatever we are going to call it.

Do I want to sit in an office and write grants, review proposals, assess things that I am far far away from and don’t understand, quote Lila Watson on my facebook profile and work for an NGO? If I learned anything from Kenya it is that smell is the only sense that allows you to understand the absence of proper sewer systems – not a movie, a report, not a photo. They help, but you don’t get it. To understand you’ve got the be there, not in an office in NYC with really bright white lights.

That sounds boring, but it might be the best way for me to ‘help’ If helping is a good idea, something I want to do, what can I contribute and from where. Why am I in India? A blonde hair, blue eyed American who can’t speak Hindi or Gujarati, I stand out, I am a foot taller than most people - I am not doing grassroots development, I am writing documents that non-english speakers can’t write. Good thing I flew all this way. Let’s talk about carbon footprints. I ride my bike here but took a jet around the world first. How do I want to be in the world?

These are the questions that trouble me right now. People still carry shit on their heads. I don’t know.

Thursday the 22 (Thanksgiving)

“Between the worlds of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field; I will meet you there. “ Rumi, Sufi Poet

It is 12:45 a.m. on a Tuesday night and I feel great, on my bike, the cool night air stealing the sweat from my skin, leaving goosebumps like the Joker left a playing card. In through my nose, out through my mouth, I breathe deeply, punctuate my exhalations by adding some voice to them. These AHHHS fall into rhythm with the movement of my pedals. Things seem like they are in slow motion, the world for me, a higher definition than high definition, crisp. Shinning almost at full, the moon looks close, like it’s snuck in for a peek, closer and bigger than usual, perfectly round, pulled in tight by the full tide of my happiness, the peace I have in that moment.

Thousands of miles from home, I think of Thanksgiving. On Thursday evening my family will gather, eat more than they should, talk about school, work, the delicious mashed potatoes, watch football, wash the dishes, joke. Most people that pass the piano will hit a few notes. Chairs will be brought up from downstairs. My grandfather at his happiest – his reasons for living all around him. Someone will set the table. My father will cook a whole extra dinner and bring it to the soup kitchen. Like a slideshow, I see the images in my head. My mom teary eyed as B.C. talks about another year of good health but the absence of people, his wife, his son and family in Israel. My uncle and father sandwich my younger cousins with their corny but fun routines, my sister braids hair. A nap on the white couch after dinner. My brother will say just the wrong thing at just the wrong time. Cinematographers change the lighting for scenes like this, they might call it ‘candlelight warmth,’ an attempt to capture emotions darting about in the air.

A left outside of the gate, my peace is assaulted. There are no cameras or microphones – the circumstances lob grenades and difficult questions at my core. In the shadows of the 12-foot high retaining wall marking the perimeter of India’s premier business school, families sleep, children curl into the valley between their parents to avoid a draft, small fires smolder, dirt continues its slow chemical reaction in the shirts, pants, saris, blankets, actually bonding to their fibers. Sidewalk beds. Jerry can sinks. No toilets. No light switches, street lamps and passing cars. These men and women, boys and girls, have a home, they have family, they have a community, people they love and who love them in return, feelings, somewhere they belong to. They matter. They have a network to rely on, but immediate concerns of eating, drinking, staying healthy and surviving dominate and persist, constant in their minds. Clothes hang against the walls, pots, pans, and little more, the easiest observation is that they are homeless, manual laborers, beggars, the people that do what no one else will, this is true but too easy, the severity of the circumstance blurring the strong social networks in place, the support, familial bonds that exist even in this big, unforgiving city. It is hard to see their parents, their village homes, farms, games they played as children, rivers they swam in, the places they’ve left for whatever reasons -- caste, finances, natural disasters, illiteracy, dreams of a better life, marriage. They have homes, years of tradition, a place of belonging.

My brother is really bad at this part. Before we eat we go around the table and ask everyone to take a moment and say what they are thankful for. Without me there he should be better, he can’t say something like: “I am thankful for Aaron’s gas,” or “Really big adenoids.” He can’t help himself. Susan just had heart surgery. Someone will say ‘good health.’ Family. Secure finances. Safety. Staring at the food on the table staring back, ‘Food.’ Diana will make everyone cry, the sound of her child’s voice piercingly sincere; she says it just right. A home. A job. A mixture of personal issues and larger World Peace type topics will be said and everyone means the words they say.

The moon’s disappeared. I know these people have family next time them and in their villages, but they are still sleeping on the ground, in the cold, outside of the walls. This is the first time I have missed Thanksgiving, thousands and thousands of miles away from home and I miss my family, that warm, familiar scene, but never on this day have I been more thankful. Yes this is an unoriginal comment from the young American living in the face of poverty. But it is true. The absurd amount of wealth, social capital, support I have in my life is, at times, unfathomable; the glasses I wear cost more than that man makes in a year, the credit card in my pocket can mobilize more money than that woman will make in the rest of her life, this bike costs what that boy will earn begging in a month, the ice cream I ate costs more than the whole family will earn today.

I think about the rationalizing barriers I build in my mind. Maybe this is an observation to offer, wondering about how I build that same wall between business school and destitution, plush green grass, and a lack of drinking water, somehow telling myself that the little I do is good enough. I sit in rickshaws for the longest 70-second intervals one can bear. As the clock counts down from 70, red to green, a woman taps my arm again and again, asking me for 10 rupees. Again and again all she says is 10, 10, 10. Her infant child, with snot exploding from its nose, perched on her hip. Ten, ten, ten. Ten rupees is $.25. I have that much and more in my pocket. She doesn’t ask me for a house. She doesn’t ask me why I am healthy, why I have a home, why I can get a job, why I don’t have to beg. She asks me for 10 rupees. Somehow, for that entire 70 seconds I find ways to tell her no, to look her in the eye as I feel my spine melting and my head pathetically sinking into my stomach, my torso like a jelly fish, no integrity, flapping like a plastic bag filled with water. I stand behind some wall I’ve built in my mind.

You should give it to a street children’s organization instead. It is likely that her husband will take the money and use it on alcohol. Sometimes there are beggar mafias that operate, and some goon will demand a cut of her money, basically renting her a certain corner to beg on. It is better if she goes to school and learns to get a real job. It is just a band aid, not a solution.

In that moment right there, there really is no good reason not to give money to that woman.

If she were sat at our table, I wonder what she would say. Besides, “Where is the rotti?” I wonder what things make her smile, what she appreciates, what she is thankful for this day.

The black and white of the contrast is too stark for my mind to process, to really understand. Why me with this and you with that? I am used to more shades of grey, space to interject ‘buts,’ and modifying clauses, usually not venturing too far away from a wall to duck behind.

The last 5 seconds on the clock switch pace, engines race all around me but the slow motion of my mind returns. I get lost in my thoughts, trying to think of the next steps from this place of appreciation to the action of showing it, to try and shatter the walls that I’ve managed to build on foundations of excuse, avoidance, and the preference for comfort. Actions instead of words. When I say I am thankful, instead of saying it with a tone of resignation - I am thankful I have this, that I am not them - to instead try to take action to show someone who might be farther from their support network and family, home, closer to the baselines of reality and survival, preoccupied with more pressing concerns, without a support network at all, that my appreciation is not a comparative one, but a true one, thankful for what I have because I am lucky to, not because you don’t. Before the light turns green I push myself to do more, to act, refuse to be passive, attempt to slowly rebuild my spine and moral standings on actions and not words.

These Eyes

After a half and hour, I found the office. Before getting in the rickshaw I asked the driver if he knew where he was going and he didn’t answer, set his mirror to zero and motioned his head for me to get in. He didn’t know. This is common and sometimes so frustrating and sometimes really fun – you know a landmark, get there and ask around, get pointed in every direction and somehow end up right where you needed to be. Normal. Here we are.

Everything about this doctor’s visit was different, mostly in ways subtle, a touch unnerving but I am in India, not bad just unfamiliar. But, so too were there differences that stirred me deep in my stomach – not bad, just too adult for me to handle.

I walk up the stairs, take off my shoes, approach the counter, tell the secretary that I have an appointment with Dr. Dipan Desai for a Lasik surgery consultation. Hindi is her first language. Gujarati is her second language; English her third. I pay in cash, Rs. 200. I sit. I wait and look at the monkeys outside the window. Sunlight beams in. After 3 minutes my name is called.

The walls are not white. The floor is not tile. None of the staff are wearing scrubs, it doesn’t smell like bleach, the couches are not made of vomit resistant material. We walk past examination rooms and offices, staff hustle about, don’t knock, prepare for their afternoon patients, dropping something off, asking a question, not interrupting, just working. Normal. The cadence of office operations play on, a different rhythm in a different tone from what I know of eye examinations and doctor’s offices, but this is the best eye clinic in the state, treating people how they do, in a way that is new to me. My feet are clammy. I am adjusting.

There are no other patients in the office. I am alone. As I walk down the hall behind a woman wearing a salwar kamiz and bindi, I am alone. I am 22 and my mother is not with me. With my head high trying to fool people, I hold the strap of my bag a little tighter. People make fun of me because I went to my pediatrician until I was 21. Familiar, I liked his bow tie and he was the doctor who knew my body best. When I had surgery during my freshman year in college, I had it in the Children’s Hospital. Since I was three I’ve been seeing the same two doctors for my eyes.

With my teeth clattering in the waiting room of a clnic in Kibera, I was not this nervous. You have malaria, take these tablets and if you are not better in three days, come back. Done and done. Back to work in 2 days, no big deal. Something about having my eyes worked on by a new doctor is hard to face on my own.

It’s been a long journey. Since birth this has been an issue for me, a constant, nothing too traumatic but a something to deal with. Not seeing the corn on my plate, my lazy eye, wearing a patch, the chiropractor, more broken frames than stars in the sky, bifocals, surgery in 8th grade, contacts, really thick lenses, that stupid fly, slow improvement, astigmatism, strabismus, the flirtatious introduction of the idea of Lasik, more contacts, poor binocularity, shitty depth perception, more glasses, getting my eyes dialated, and the beat goes on. Standing in the smalls pools of my sweat from my feet, I am getting ready to talk to a doctor about ending this, a surgery that will fix my eyes. Just like that. 22 years later. Out patient, some drops, 3 days later back at ‘em 20/20. My parents aren’t with me, here I am as an adult facing decisions that feel really important, all on my own. The color of the walls don’t matter – it is this that is unsettling.

Arrogant, this doctor is a surgeon. Daily he plays god, knows it, and wears his hubris in his smile, posture. He calls me Boss. This is his normal sales pitch, a confidence that is meant to be overwhelming and irresistibly reassuring. He doesn’t get how long I’ve been waiting for this appointment, that it is important to me, but that I could just as well wait another 2 years. He has the best machine and is the best at doing what he does, and this makes it harder to dismiss him with my normal response to people who are this smug. He talks a lot, some of it bullshit, a lot of it not, his tone hasn’t changed – this is who he is, a surgeon who is proud of himself, broadcasting.

Today I will go back to his office, have my eye mapped, cornea analyzed, eyes dilated and examined, and he will study these results, after which he will tell me if he thinks he can perform this operation.

It is possible that my vision is still too bad, the technology, despite its advances in the past years, is not ready for my eyes. So too is it possible that I could be in a position to make a decision, here, on my own, alone, an important one, a touch overwhelmed. No support system here, no one to sit in the waiting room with. 22.

A painful irony bubbles up, his surgical hubris met by my American ego. Surely, without question, we in America have the best medical technology, the smartest doctors, latest techniques. Right? No. I know this. I know that technology in other parts of the world is way ahead of what we have in the U.S. We send our computers to be fixed in India. India produces some of the smartest scientists and engineers in the world. One third of practicing doctors in the U.S. are of Indian descent. I know this. And yet, I am a little uneasy. There is no good reason to support this. This man is trained in Germany, indeed has the best machine in the world right now for this procedure – the same machine that FDA bureaucracy and medical supply company infighting prevents from reaching American markets – a machine developed in Germany, tested in Sweden and Japan. Tested. Proven. Accurate. Succesful. Still uneasy.

I spent last summer combing the slums of Kenya looking for brilliant and innovative new designs among the ‘base of the pyramid’ – the poorest of the poor. I read development literature praising the resourcefulness of non traditional ways of thinking, alternative knowledge bases. Oral traditions. Collective memories. Homemade solar panels. Self constructed prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs. All sorts of inventions and ways of capturing knowledge that are non-Western. Call them what you will – they are not practiced by surgeons. Parts of me admire this thought processes, innovation. But, there is a stark contradiction in my appreciation and acceptance of lessons from non traditional places and my refusal or discomfort with lessons, advancement, medical treatment in traditional places that I trust with other ways of healing me. Maybe I do some yoga, drink certain types of cleansing teas, pour water through my nose, consider my energy and that of other people. But, if I get sick I am going to go to a doctor, not take ayurvedic treatment. If I have a headache, I take advil.

So why is this doctor any different from the advil I take. Why am I suspicious of his technicians? There are some really stupid technicians in the US, no? Are the patients that he has operated successfully on over here any different than Americans? How can I rationalize my discomfort when I will spew water through my nose or do yoga as a way to tend to my health for some things, but trust western medicine far more for sickness and disease? Here this man lies at the pinnacle of his profession within that tradition of medical treatment I trust most, the only difference is that he practices in India and not NYC.

It is stupid, but I am still uneasy.

Maybe it is because I am doing this on my own, maybe it is because I am being stupid, I don’t know. This afternoon will let me know if I really need to push this forward, or if it was just another exercising in exploring my independence.

Doing This Work

It’s been a while since I posted last. This, I think, is a good thing, a sign that I am growing more comfortable, a comfort that is sincere and grows from my core, not from my desire to communicate messages of surety during a time of insane personal transition. I know I have this tendency, to bluff my way through talking about deeper things despite my very real experiences with them, writing instead. So, not writing is a sign that deep down, I’ve arrived to a place of less emotional volatility. Maybe.

This is not to say that things are any smoother, just that I am coping better. Work remains a shit show but the bowel movements are a tad more predictable (this wordplay seems tasteless in the context of work with sewage workers). People won’t meet me for breakfast meetings before work, the days won’t be full of productive meetings, there are no agendas or minutes, tea interrupts, no consistent email access. Orientations can’t prepare you to be a new person. Call it culture, call it the American college graduate working with an NGO in India, call it what you will, blame it on the visceral forces that be, my experiences remain. Non-native english speakers don’t write well in english. Workshops can’t fix this. The staff don’t really understand how to relate to other NGOs, funders, keep proper documentation, think strategically – this is the reality, and I am learning what is set and what is open for change. These problems were here before me and will be here. And then there are other things that I can do, that will take a lot of work and prodding, but I know will be helpful. Above all, I am learning a lot about NGO politics - that in the same way that no good deed goes unpunished, no initiative goes uncontested. In India, there are expressions to the same effect – that you only get into trouble once you start following the law.

For my first six weeks in Ahmedabad I worked patiently with people, sat in three-day workshops where I really didn’t understand a single word, took tea and more tea, went to the field, helped with grants as they came up, talked with the staff, conducted impact assessments, participatory observation at my best, trying to make sense, mold my edges to fit into the puzzle. When I made a move to try and shake some things up, to take initiative, to split my time between the hair splitting, but important work here, and a different, equally important, related project to be overlooked by a partner NGO, New York, in the nicest, most sensitive, political, guarded NGO speak, came down as clearly as things come in this arena. Aaron: There were many options to explore, feelings to be sensitive too, caution against haste, dynamics in play, precedent to be wary of, mutual learning experiences to be cognizant of, cultural differences, norms and expectations, pride in play, power dynamics that need to be addressed and considered in going forward.

Yes, there are all of these things and they are important. But, this is exactly what I had been doing since arriving. Admitted: I ranted on emails and phone calls, left the office early one day so that I could ride around on my bike and scream my frustration, and approached my wit’s end many, many times. But, at work I was patient, responsive, did what was asked, sensitive and bla bla bla, assessing the situation as best as I could and coming up with a plan that I sincerely feel would be the best for me and the organizations involved.

New York says that conference calls are going to get to the bottom of it -- meaning well and intending to create the best of the situation, but effectively stating that my efforts are not relevant and that they, from NYC over the phone in an hour, will get to the bottom of the exact complexities their terms warned me of. Chosen because I would be a flexible volunteer who would work well in an uncertain situation, I was quite confused; Wasn’t I doing exactly that? I must have followed the law or done a good deed.

This is tremendously frustrating. It doesn’t, however, make me furrow my brow – my telltale of stress. Initially, it did, and as this was going down, I was going bizerk, writing more emails and making more phone calls than an agent on draft night, trying to guide the situation in the direction I envisioned, trading this for that, bluffing a little here, liberally interpreting phrases there. Now, I just do my work, work that I understand to be needed and important, work with the community, with my organization, putting my time and energy into the progress on the ground and not the titles of that progress or headings of the project it falls under, the MOU that guides it. I am learning; sometimes egos are managed best by sacrificing yours, telling people what they need to hear, and going ahead. I will go ahead.

On Sunday night, crawling through traffic on the overnight bus from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, I was thinking of the weekend. It was a nice weekend. Nice to see some of the other people on the trip, to joke, share common memories, hear gossip, eat nice food, take a hot shower, go swimming. Of course we talked about our work. Some of the details are different, but the premises largely the same – lack of clarity, not much work, no communication, and a large amount of uncertainty. Wide awake in the plush leather chair of the air conditioned Volvo bus (the roads are so bad that every 10 minutes it felt like the bus was hit by a mortar round) thinking of conversations from the weekend and news of other fellows throughout the country, their posture bothered me, the tone of some of the things said, an acceptance, a complacence. Placing a distance between their organization, its work, and the people it works for, they’ve retreated in large part to a disconnected place that relieves them of responsibility, any implication to the reality on the ground, a bystander. Whether they actually have a stake in the ground is another question, but the point of this year is to at least explore, engage, see, feel, react, work hard, make things happen. Or, maybe its not and that’s why I feel very different from most of the people on this trip.

Regardless, all of us are struggling with what to do, adjusting to a new country, living, and working situation and this is not easy, but with seven months to go it feels that people on this program are accepting the situations they are in, content to do what comes up, forego initiative because of daunting circumstances, jamming excuses or matters of convenience between achievable work and possible accomplishments, and ideas of what is ‘realistic’ or ‘sensitive’ or ‘their role.’

Banksy, a British graffiti artist, has a quote in his book to the effect: people don’t take initiative because no one ever told them they could. This bothers me and I don’t want to be one of these people. It is this thought that was in my mind Sunday night on the way back from Mumbai. It is time to get shit going.

--

I am happy; I smile often, and feel peaceful with where I am, what I am doing, what I am trying to do. At my nucleus, there is balance. So too is there a lot of activity, energy, ideas shooting around, a healthy amount of discomfort and confusion, schemes for projects and initiatives, a couple more protons than neutrons, doing my best never to be neutral and always be positive. Sure there is volatility, electrons bounce around and sometimes this strikes me deep down, but for the most part I am dealing with what is before me, doing my best, and when that is not good enough, working harder or from a different angle, but aware too that there are things I can’t change no matter how badly I want to.

Pakistan is insane, I feel lonely in the ok and usual way that I usually do, desiring companionship but afraid to make the sacrifices that it requires (and unable to meet any single women here), loved the package, appreciate the emails, hope the field hockey women win the championship, am glad the Yankees signed Jorge, miss my friends, fart, look forward to moving into my apartment and my new, green room, am going to see my first Bollywood movie tonight, try to grow a beard while not becoming the guy with nasty facial hair, think often about jobs next year, dream of the trip I will take before returning to NYC, read a lot, eat too much mango ice cream, consider Lasik surgery, love the food, ring the bell on my bike, and do my best to smile all the while.

I am a very lucky young man.

Training

Surprisingly, the day was scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m. Our office normally opens at 10 a.m. and even then we normally just mull about, read the paper and drink tea until about 11 a.m. Nothing in Ahmedabad is open at this time. I don’t expect the staff to be open. On my way to work the coffee shops hibernate through the dark winter hours of night and show no signs of stirring for the approaching Spring day of business. Days are jolted to a start, and jolted again and again, not with a caffeine narcotic in a coffee form, but a different, more saccharine British version – a cup of tea, and it is these tea stalls that start the day. Throughout the world, this combination of water, milk, black tea, and sugar sustains millions of people as breakfast lunch, a welcoming offering, a medicine, and a snack. The day revolves around tea. It is made in the office, on the street, in homes, in stalls, on the sidewalk, served with the natural ease of a pendulum’s path.

Around 9:20, the staff begin to trickle in. Some are bleary eyed, visibly tired from the long journey on loud uncomfortable busses, likely sat next to fat coughing men. I so much appreciate the effort they’ve made. By 9:32, I am being chided to begin, to start my training to a half empty room because, the assistant director tells me, the staff were told to arrive on time and we should start without them. For a second, because of the dust in the air, I couldn’t see just right. Punctuality? Is that you? This is like the first sighting of land, a beacon of hope in a sea of confusion that lies between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer as the goalposts of punctuality. Whether you touch down at 9:30 a.m. in Panama or 10 a.m. in Costa Rica, it doesn’t really matter – you’ve made it, you’re here. Where’s the tea? And, the training is not for the empty white plastic chairs staring at me, it is for the people who will sit in them.

A boxer before a match, I mull about, jump a little rope through the slides of my presentation, break a sweat not on purpose, and try to think of my best, really bad Hindi. More sweat now. Am I trying to fit too much in too little time? Will they understand? How am I going to communicate?

Who cares – it is time to start and like all anti-climactic New Years countdowns, I realize that 9:47 is not that different from 9:48.

Thank you all for coming. This training is for you, so please please please, if you have any questions, just ask. I am really happy to be here and want this to be a conversation more than a lecture, something helpful that you can walk away with, an introduction of a skill that will translate back to the field…

Blank stares. Great start. I really wowed ‘em.

My workshop is on work plans. All week I’ve been planning a program on how to plan programs, hoping to introduce a more logical, long-term, specific sort of thinking. I know I am between Capricorn and Cancer, but the Equator is gone, there is no direct line of communication. With the hopes of getting as much across as possible, I continue.

Anjali and I stand at the front and while I flounder in the ocean of blank stares, she calmly extends a life jacket from the rescue boat. It isn’t easy working in translation, but she is so familiar with the staff and understands what I am trying to communicate that she really if a lifesaver. Slowly, we start to move., a few notes jotted down here, a request to hold that slide just a touch longer, a question.

We talk through some more things and then I just skip a couple of slides to get to the exercise. In developing this training I was trying to think of an example that was relatable, that would get the women involved, and require detail but not be too excruciating. Cooking – a perfect example of my ineptitude that would allow the staff to laugh at me and the women to stand in a position of power.

Screaming in capital letters at the top of the screen, the slide read: I need your help!!! The premise: I was having 10 dinner guests but don’t know how to cook. Develop a work plan (goals, objectives, activities, needs, timelines, person responsible, deliverables) for this event.

Buzz. Confusion. A few smiles.

And then, one of the most brilliant 15-second interactions, a marvelous exchange that summarizes the millions of pages of development literature on the importance of women in the ‘third’ world.

Above the hum of giddy voices, one man belted out: “Tell the women to do it.”

No sooner than the T was pronounced, without missing a single beat, one of the women said: “Order in.”

Game. Set. Match..

In break out groups, the women scolded the men on their stupid suggestions of starting the rottie before the vegetables, or cleaning the table before the cooking was complete. Teams worked together, creating grand ballrooms and five star hotels out of my house, creative and imaginative to an inspiring degree.

Once tea was served, we came back together. This took a long time, people comparing notes, scrambling to add something last minute before handing in their exam, see what other people were serving, what they forgot. Everyone wanted to present first. I was hoping to “just run through some stuff,” in an attempt to get to the next step, of making the connection between this exercise and their work, but there would be no such running. Each group had to speak and with time, pride, and eloquence.

A feast of work plans prepared, we moved forward, overfull with the practical applications of such a process. It was awesome, divine intervention I am sure. I asked if this was helpful and, after the delay in translation, a dramatic pause that allowed me to notice each drop of sweat as it crawled down the side of my body from my armpit, the staff erupted in nods and smiles.

That moment was euphoric. I felt very proud of that work, to have provided something that was fun and useful. Asking how we could go forward, the staff demanded that I do a training once a month at the monthly staff meetings.

Later in the day, I pulled one of the staff aside and asked him if the training was good, of what I could do better next time. He just smiled at me and said, “Very usefiul.”

Dancing & Navratri

http://picasaweb.google.com/theLastCP/Navratri

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIQL9B2Jz6I

These are the sort of nights that makes Chevrolet donate money to scholarship funds, Gatorade declare impact performers of the week, and Vodafone hold press conferences on the pitch after the most thrilling match of the year. During action like these cameramen sweat, anxious that they are not capturing all the action, that they might miss the play of the century that could happen at any approaching moment. The air is right for history to be written. Bulbs flash and cameras click, the beauty of each movement so perfect, so fluid, executed from a subconscious muscle memory that wows the on looking crowd of wide-eyed fathers, tip toeing girls and boys and admiring mothers. Only the archivists rest, well aware that this night will not be stowed in any dusty drawer or computer file. The people’s champ -- with an ending suited for a leader returned from exile, a sports great retiring after his/her last game, triumphant, carried off on the shoulders of two total strangers to the beat of blaring music and the hearts of my supporters gathered in hordes. Triumphant.

If only. Reality speaks: I am just a white guy who showed up at a garba on a Saturday night, was in the right place at the right time and got love for the audacity to dance, not the dance itself, respect for my energy, not my steps, the intrigue of a gangly foreigner. Still, it was the most memorable of nights – a night of improbable, fortuitous connections that could not have ended better.

An old friend from high school, and by that I mean someone I hadn’t seen since graduation but once, 3 weeks earlier in Delhi. Alumni grapevines put us in touch, and her free weekend brought her to Ahmedabad. Her name is Anna and because she is a she my landlord prohibited her from staying at our flat. So, on the Wednesday before her Friday arrival I emailed a girl I met on Sunday to politely and oh so subtly just see, just ask, if she had space in her dorm room. No Kevin Bacon, but as the small world of fancy college students turns, the would be host, Shubha, and Anna lived in the same dorm last year.

Anna arrived safely and on Saturday night we three went to Amanda and Conner’s apartment– two people Shubha knows from an arts academy in Ahmedabad. One of Conner and Amanda’s coworker’s uncle had passes to a garba (dance) so we packed into his pimped out 4x4 and were on our way. Like a big family sneaking kids into a drive-in movie, our car swam passed the guards and into the parking lot. Exiting through the drunk, I was handed a pass to the Academy Awards – or the garba equivalent, and though I was not up for any awards or had any business being there my shoulders back and sauntered in like any New Yorker would – like it was my party – taking photos on the red carpet, waving to onlookers, tossing my pass to the guard.

Membership at this club is $10,000. It is nice, replete with every luxury imaginable. Thousands of people dressed in traditional costumes swarmed about, buzzing, dancing, calling, eating, judging, fawning. I walked into a rainbow, but was in the midst of it, able to walk through the gradations of color change in the costumes all around me, seeing the difference between periwinkle, salmon, coral, pink, rose, and magenta – each obviously discrete members of the color wheel and each requiring a different complement, shade of show, bindi, and accompanying henna. Wearing dirty cloths from the U.S., I was the sore thumb. Bullied by the massive sign over the entrance to the dance floor – TRADITIONAL DRESS ONLY – I kicked it with Juice on the side.

Juice is the man who got me into the party. Juice is not his real name, I don’t know his real name, but he has a video screen for a rearview mirror. Juice.

With my hands in my pockets I stood watching the concentric circles of dancers in step with the beat, my head rotating occasionally, awestruck and overwhelmed. Juice was checkin’ out the babes. I soon joined him, traveling through the world’s Springs to see the most colorful flowers blossom, the most evolutionarily isolated courting rituals unfold right in front of me. The roles of the sexes switched, biology informing the costume’s colors, the women the suitors and many mates they did attract, with a grace, an exposed back, a maddeningly simple beauty. Women who whose curves spite the perfect shape of the Os of gorgeous, whose hair is a more perfect tale then than the y of beauty. Birds of paradise in a rhythmic circle, the taste buds of my eyes accosted by the colors, flavors, heat and spice captured in the vibrant chili pepper coloring of their clothing, the fleshy brightness of the inside of every fresh fruit in the world immediately after being cracked open, the stark contrast between jet black of seeds and hair at the center with the glow of a color that pulses with life.

I was happy watching.

As the night went on, prizes were given out, children dragged their parents home early, that bully of a sign sat lording over me popping the urges to dance as the bubbled up inside of me.

Then, my jam came on. I had never heard the song before, but watching one round of the dance that accompanied it was enough of a rush to launch me to an irrationality of revenge on all the times in the E.G. program I got picked on. No more bully.

Sprinting onto the converted cricket pitch to join my buddy Conner, we danced. A crowd gathered. We danced. For this dance, everyone squats while there is a lull in the music. Then it builds. And builds. And builds to the point where at one specific beat everyone jumps up and goes crazy, dancing like possessed beasts, happiness raining down like gum drops and world peace. Danced we did and happy we were.

The crowd grew, with each round of the dance, more and more people gathered, some to dance, most to watch. Cell phone cameras. Stares. Laughs. Smiles. Cameramen. Video cameras on a live video feed to the movie-sized screens all around the venue. The lull. The build. The build. Explosion and joy. We just danced and loved it. Before I knew what was going on, I was in the air, on the shoulders of two men. I just smiled and kept bouncing my shoulders.

As the music ended, the energy didn’t. I was on top of the world. Walking out, drenched in sweat, grown men walked by and thanked me for dancing. I was the king of the world.

I Had A Good Day

I rode my bike home with a sense of satisfaction. I emailed my supervisor with a document (I never said that what I did was good, helpful, or mattered to people). Today was a good day.

This is not the script of an anti depressant commercial, it is the lead story of my nightly broadcast and as I stand in the kitchen eating yogurt, fruit, raisins, and peanuts for dinner, it finally feels good to know that the sun is setting on a day where I did something.

Tea and newspapers still dominate the morning. But, just before lunch I was able to complete a needs assessment survey, get it translated into Gujarati and have it photocopied so that when I go on field visits next week I will be able to clearly, and with some methodology, ask the field staff basic questions that will guide me on my way to helpful work. Lunch was delicious. In the afternoon I finished an organizational map, trying to filter my thoughts and observations from the past month into a chart and series of paragraphs that show funding flows, interpersonal, and interorganizationl power dynamics. Completing this proved to be a good exercise, a way to walk through my thoughts see which ones were clear enough to put down, which need further exploration and which are just wrong. The real challenge now is to understand how to use this constructively, to present this information is constructive feedback that can be used to improve the relationships, communications, and work in general. I even got on the schedule for an upcoming three-day capacity building workshop for the staff which gives me a project to prepare. A good day.

As I close my eyes to the lullaby of circling gnats, my boss’s (the in-country AJWS coordinator) words echo in my brain, haunting almost, as if I may have betrayed all my academic training and the good advice so many smart people have given me. Is my push towards productivity counterproductive in this context, rushing me along to the point where I am missing the lessons? Why am I so happy that I wrote a document? Parts of me hate that I even entertain this thought, peeved two days ago by not having anything to do and now actually taking mental bandwidth to consider if doing work is bad. In the call she toed the anthropological party line, urging me to rethink what productivity means, how the people at my organization view this word in the course of their work, and where the real lessons might lie.

Defending my desires for productivity before she finished her thought, I found myself quite the scientist among liberal arts majors, punishing ideas of cultural relativity, shredding notions of non-traditional knowledge, and suplexing the too common thought that history has many paths and outcomes. Problem is, I am not a scientist. I am an anthropology major. I appreciate a holistic way of looking at the world and appreciating different peoples, places, and mental paradigms.

Balance is what I seek. Not surprisingly, I fall into an anthropological thought to save me – like anything I am a product of my environment and how I view the world, the opinions that I hold deep down, unconscious reactions to certain situations, my impulses, are cultural constructions that rise from an upbringing in America. Despite desires to distance myself with the most spurious American stereotypes, or think my upbringing non traditional, these ideas don’t stretch this far. Standing next to other Americans, my childhood was unique. Nothing radical, but substantially different and how I think, the people I know, and who I have become as a result is atypical in America (it may be fairly typical of kids of liberal parents, kids who like to think their upbringings different – but that’s another conversation) but standing in India, my mind stands out as American, Western perhaps, modern, in how I approach things, in my judgments of good and bad, assessments of culture and ‘progress,’ ‘development,’ and productivity. Seesawing, trying to find a space that is balanced, respectful of local customs, patient with the office, staff, and organization on the one hand and ideas of helping, improvement, efficiency on the other, I keep this in my mind, happy, and unashamed to say it, that I did some work while hoping to put that work within a framework that is not imposing, scientific or didactic, but guided by those mushy and important anthropological thoughts.

--

I think of my time in intervals, intervals structured around big events, events that I can look forward, that can make a week pass extra fast, can crack a month in half, or put my mind into the next year. This week a friend is coming to visit, then site visits next week with Navratri going on all along. Easily, without even noticing that time is passing, that gets me to the late 20s of October when I am going to present at the staff training and my roommate is having an engagement party on the 28^th. Preparations for that will kill the last days of the previous week. With the Impact Assessment in the first week of November, I should be able to get all the way to Divali before I know it. And, once I do, I am off to Mumbai and Pune to see some friends and celebrate. Basically, it is already mid November and I’ve not gotten to planning that far but hopefully I will have consistent work by then that will be exciting and engaging. A couple of days off for Hanukah, the mid year retreat in Thailand in January, hopefully the ‘rents will visit in February, another retreat for Passover and things are cooking. Time flies when you are planning to make it so.

At the moment though, I feel like a Vespa trying to merge onto an interstate mega highway. I do not have the right vehicle to be doing this, but I’ve got what I got, I am here and there is traffic behind me. Life is racing everywhere around me and I can’t turn back, there is no shoulder, I have to drive. If I can just jump in, start on my way in the right lane, time will tell, I will catch some help from an updraft or downhill, and there will be uphills too, but my signal is on and I’ve got to pick a spot. Despite mechanical difficulty, I’ve made it to the on ramp and am sticking my nose out just a bit, not quite ready to jump in, the traffic still too fast and unforgiving, unprepared on this big road to stop for such a different, puny scooter. But, soon I will be driving along just like everyone else.

--

Academics and politicians constantly remind the world that India invented the zero. More importantly, I think they invented the color, that before India life must have been in black and white, a charcoal sketch, that when planes cross country borders in the air, you can watch the colors disappear, from front to back, first class to the last cabin, an etch-a-sketch eraser being shaken as the go across that phantom line. If there was color before India it was a boring primary color scheme, Crayola couldn’t fathom the names or the hues of its box of 64 without coming here. Even if the rest of the world figured out how to use more than primary colors, they would still be boring, and pale in comparison to the Technicolor reality throughout India. India’s colors are what technology cant figure out how to capture in megapixels, HD, or HiFi. It is the festival season right now and Sony’s finest engineers scramble from garba to garba, trying to compute the composition of timeless colors, colors that invented the category, predated their names or patents or imitations in television.

--

The director returned from his three week trip and it is good having him back. He returned from a series of meetings on the national sewage workers rights campaign. It took him three weeks, and he did stop in his home village to visit his mother, but it raises a tactical and logistical question: how would you run/coordinate a national campaign? The NYT just published an article that says diesel transport trucks average 10 km/hour on trips from Kolkatta to Mumbai. This is a long journey traversing the continent, but the roads are so bad and process to collect road taxes to bad that travel is painstakingly slow. A trip from Ahmedebad to Mumbai takes ~ 9-11 hours on bus. Trains are more expensive than busses and planes the most expensive of all. Most of the leaders from the state levels are not computer literate and phone access is usually reliable but prone to signal problems and many dropped calls and it is not cheap.

Communication with him is difficult but because he is the leader, what he says goes. He is not shy about telling me what do to and I appreciate this. Contrasted by the working environment when he was gone, when there was no clear leader, no person to direct, I prefer this. We have work to do in growing to think in a more long-term way, but it is good that he is back.

At lunch, in broken english, with his right arm punctuating each point, he makes it clear why he is the man. His voice’s passion is undeniable. On a dime, his tone turns from relaxed, talking of cricket or clothes or what’s for lunch, he starts talking about NGO culture in Delhi. That right arm is his tell, when it is flailing, pointing, exploding, ducking, flying, smacking you know he is on, talking from his soul. When it is still, sat on a table, rested at his side, he is trying to be more calculated, a bluff of sorts, an attempt to be more careful in his word choice, the topic not of his liking or comfort. For this comment his right arm is where it likes to be. ‘In Delhi,’ he tells me, ’20 percent of organizations are real. The rest only meeting, eating, speaking and reporting.’

He knows what is important for an organization despite not knowing the word grassroots.

--

An article in this morning’s paper helped me get a better sense of the danger of the work. Power in numbers. In the last two and a half years, 227 people in Pune working as sewage workers and street sweepers died. Not all died on the job, but most did.

In the U.S., a story on trapped coal miners in West Virginia enthralls the nation, leads on the nightly news with the packages bearing headlines like ‘What Went Wrong?’ and ‘The Victim’s Families,’ or ‘Is This Work Safe.’ Those men died, and they were brothers, fathers, friends, and sons – it is tragic. I don’t dare suggest otherwise.

Here, there is very little media coverage and the numbers of people who die, fathers, brothers, lovers, and cousins just the same, is not news, it is normal. The corporate representative responded that the workers would be issues gumboots and gloves. Laughable really. As I plunge into a sewer, fully immersed, with toxic gasses in my eyes and lungs, gum boots are really going to save me. Yes, protection of any kind is better than none at all, but the bigger question remains: what is going on that these people are allowed to, that it is their job to, and their children are being groomed to, jump into an open sewer?

Repressed

Talking over tea at his house in Chapel Hill, Naman told me people were going to stare. He was right. They do. And so too was he right that they are innocent and mean well, curious to know this person they have seen in the movies, read about in the newspapers, a fascinating creature from the other side of the world in their city. With this in my mind, I often wave back (sometimes I am annoyed), aware and understanding of this sweet curiosity.

In the three weeks since I arrived, these cultural courtships continue consistently but are waning in intensity as the smells and sights of the garishly colored male fade. Past the initial steps of our relationship, my mind and this new world are in a new place, a distilled, refined next step in understanding what’s around, searching for the legs, body and tannins, not just the grape – that men use their breast pocket on their dress shirts, that women keep their money in the left strap of their brow just under their sari, that no one puts their lips on a glass but pours it into their mouth instead. Academic training is largely overblown, people holding more degrees than names but trapped in a formal education system that conditions thoughts away from creativity and into a box of success, right and wrong, good and bad. One of my co workers took the day off for her exams. She is 33, but still taking classes, adding certificates to her C.V. but unable to scan two pieces of paper into one document, making one document for each side of each page – just as she was taught 12 years ago when she completed her coursework.

A bobble head reply for yes.

These things are amusing, the small bright things that add living color to complete the composite of a national flag. And so too are their drabs grays and diluted browns. Here, I am not speaking of caste, or poverty, or anything of such international renown, but instead, of the deeply confused, horny generation that watches Bollywood movies with sparkling women and bare flesh and then goes home to arranged marriages and sexual repression in their horniest years.

American women, they, uh, are cooperative in these matters? One 25-year old asks this way. Another, when I tell him I am from America grabs his right forearm with his left arm while franticly wiggling the fingers on his right arm. One night stands? You can get girls? The questions come in all forms, and I dumbfounded by them. I get questions like this all the time, understand where they come from, but am repulsed by the comfort with which they are asked and the expectation of certain answers.

Cooperative in these matters? Are you serious? Did that just happen? Uncomfortable saying the word sex, but with internet access in his home he is horny beyond repair in the context of acceptable Indian behavior and wants to live vicariously through the words I am about to tell him: that American women are easy.

Instead, I shut them all down and tell them that it is impossible to find women in the U.S. and I am thinking of arranging a marriage while I am here.

Lazy Eyes

It is fitting that this post sits below the excerpt above, the blurb that I wrote 4 years ago when I started this blog, thinking it clever then, liking its sentiments but not its word choices now, but still indicative of my mental achilles heel, something I know doesn’t actually set me apart, is not that big of a deal in the scheme of things, but feels so to me. New acquaintances find this out in the evenings when I switch from contacts to eyeglasses and feel self conscious. With my glasses on, I rarely look people right in the eyes or just don’t wear them around people I am just coming to know.

Wearing a patch as a little guy, bifocals, surgery in 8^th grade, depth perception, lazy eye, the chiropractor, astigmatism, contact lenses, my eyes have always been something to deal with. As a result, it is something I notice.

Living here is the ultimate retort to questions about my coke bottle glasses, prescription or bad vision. The man at the internet café and one of the unions leaders have the most pronounced lazy eyes but I seen them everywhere on people of all ages. My roomate’s is very subtle and is corrected by his eyeglasses. The little girl who lives on the corner turns her head to the right to look forward. The man at the internet tilts his chin down and looks up. Countless others

They can all see, but they can’t use their eyes together and their eyes are not straight. They will never be. I’ll take my thick glasses. Lucky me.