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.

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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.

Cutting of a Camel

Each morning pigeons outside our window wake me up. They are properly stupid birds and don’t know how to shut up. Cooled by the fan, I roll over for thirty more minutes until my watch alarm goes off. Slowly, I get up, but before I do I debate with myself for 13 seconds if I really want to go running or if I want to go back to sleep. Surprisingly, because I don’t just love running for the sake of running or getting fit, running has been winning out. Standard morning things: brush my teeth, take a vitamin, eat a banana, and drink lots of water. Smelly from yesterday, I grab my shorts and t-shirt, throw on my shoes and socks and head out.

Everyday I say hello to the guard. He always waves back but looks confused. Still, he smiles. Out of the gate I make a right, give a jocular What’s Up Fellas to the three rickshaw drivers parker there, themselves waking up from the comforts of their back seat. With the rains extended this late into the year, the ground is always moist in the morning, and the biggest puddles are always on our block. By this time of the day the sun is warm and busy drinking any moisture left in the air but it is my favorite part of the day because the streets are not yet crowded, the shops just opening, it is the most opportune time to think myself inconspicuous. Compared to the U.S., the days here are shifted later with all the same meals and meetings, but everything just pushed later in the day. I like the morning.

At the top of our street I take another right, cross the street, pass the internet café, walk another 1000 feet and get to the lake. While walking I steal a page a book from Mom’s book and get many of the same responses. Usually I am dressed as ridiculously as she is when she goes running, she always wears tights, a massive hoodie, bunched socks, running shoes, maybe a hat, and I am wearing pink and purple Umbros, a blue shirt and bright yellow hat, and do some exercises to limber up while waving and smiling at everyone I pass. A couple toe touches, elbows to opposite knee, heel to butt. No matter what, people are going to stare so I step to center stage.

I’ve become a regular at the lake in the mornings and recognize a few others and each day our greetings become a little warmer. It’s nice. Stretching for a couple of minutes, I jog, huff and puff, and fart a lot. Those farts always feel good because dairy and I ge along so well on the front end and then our relationship is a little more noisy and clamorous on the backend. We’ve reached an impasse and this just seems to be our working relationship.

With my shirt soaked through, brow dripping, my mind clear and body feeling good, I start walking back to the flat, stopping off at the fruit seller. Of course, without fail, when I get back the rest of the guys are sleepily draped on the chairs in the living room with the T.V. blasting. With my fruit and the newspaper I sit on the balcony, cool off, pump some potassium and catch up on the latest Bollywood gossip.

Around 8:45 the maid comes. She is a great woman and we have a great relationship that consists of me getting in her way despite my every and best intention not too. She gets pissed when I leave banana peals on the counter, shoos me with her broom and cleans like a goddess. I run away and jump in the shower. These bucket showers are growing on me, a lot more playful and interactive than normal showers, not to mention that they save a lot of water. A little air dry under the fan, iron action (everyone here irons their clothing, it is unacceptable not to), lotion, hat and sunglasses and I am out the door.

Riding my bike is an experience in and of itself. People gawk – what the hell is that white guy doing riding a bike. Every single bike and car that passes jabs at me with its horn and I carefully counterattack with the poison of my bell. I fight bullets with flowers at every opportunity, sometimes just sprinkling serenades to lucky passerbys. Intersections are the worst. Riding towards them I feel like a NOAA pilot approaching the eye of the storm, survivors strewn about and speeding on their way, happy for their good fortune of survival. Like a good running back, I patiently wait for an opening and good lead blocker, then burst forward, hoping to get through but prepared for a collision.

Driving and riding a bike here is what conducting a vehicle will be like in 1,000 years on Mars. Will Smith stole the idea of his bad futuristic movies from the drivers here – there are no rules, no planes, no directions, cars going everywhere in every direction, cows, elephants, goats. Literally, people just do whatever they want, the wrong way down highways, u-turns, no signal… these are mild, not-even infractions. Drivers in the US and Europe just don’t understand it and will have to wait for commercial space travel prices to come down.

This madness is grating. People don’t honk as an insult, more as a warning but there are only so many blasts one can hear each morning without going crazy. I cant take all the honking and bad driving. It is instinctual. The New Yorker in me erupts all the time and it’s all I can do to cage it, like when people honk at me, as if I am at fault for driving on the correct side of the street and they and 2 passengers are speeding at me on their motorbike in the wrong direction right at me. What the fuck asshole, I think. You are wrong and I am right – move. But, instead I merge back into traffic and almost get nailed by an oncoming camel.

Finally I get to work, pouring sweat, happy to be safe, ready to start the day.

These Seasons Aren't Mine

rLunar; Solar; Academic; Pol Pot’s; Norman; Nordic; Native American; Aztec; Olmec; Many different Hindu versions; China’s history owns dozens; Islam and the Middle East their own renditions. In the course of time there have been countless inventions to measure its passing, attempts at demarcating the passing of the days, the settings of the suns, the revolutions of the earth, the birth of saviors and dictators, or the first day of class.

My new life and the calendar it rests on don’t match my mind and the weather. In a meeting this morning I wrote the date across the top of the page: October 6. With the sweat of my palm smudging the ink, it felt wrong, too hot to be October. I don’t know what I am going to be for Halloween and I don’t know not because I am trying to think of something phenomenal for Franklin Street, but because Halloween isn’t celebrated in Ahmedabad.

Other holidays yes, but not the ones on my calendar. Newspaper headlines are buzzing with consumer forecasts, travel advice, and one-day shopping events in preparation of the holiday season, bonuses are being doled out for Navrati and Diwali – massive festivals, one in October the other in November, lasting a week each -- not Christmas, Hanukah, New Years, or Thanksgiving. My mind’s paradigm for understanding the world I occupy, for knowing what to look forward to, what clothes to ready, days off to expect, joyous occasions to anticipate, is disharmonious with reality.

It felt wrong not just because it is too warm for October – we ought to be cozying into sweater weather – but also because it is Saturday, and thus the duality of my mindfuck reveals itself. Living in a new city in a new country poses challenges. Finding my identity out of college does too. Here, across the world and just out of college, these challenges are dialectical, exacerbating each other all the time.

For the first time in my life I am on my own, the exact path before me is not clear and the responsibility for deciding how I want to lead my life, what I want to be, how to go forward into young adulthood, is solely mine. Everyone goes through this process of questioning and introspection at some point or many points in their life, and emails tell me that my friends and most of the class of ’07 are too. Knowing that others are also grappling is comforting, but still, for me, it feels like a very important time. Without being too dramatic and self righteous, I do worry about happiness, love, career, a family, balance, good health, health insurance, money, real estate – all on some levels reflective of deeper questions about life choices, morals, and the constitution of my life and my self.

With these questions in my mind, I’ve landed on the other side of the world where I don’t know the language, look like anyone, and have yet to really land with my feet confidently on the ground, uncertainty pervasive in all that I do. Exploring these things at this time in my life is tough. Sitting in work, I question if I want to work in the non profit world. I also question if I want to work overseas. These seem like different questions, but they are so closely related that I am having a tough time finding myself, making sense of my work, exploring parts of India, and processing it all in a way that is not wholly confusing. All the time, this dichotomy exists and looking forward, I just don’t know what holds life lessons, and what holds India lessons, and when I can and cannot make such distinctions. Right now I am just trying to match the calendar and the weather.

Gandhiji's Birthday

Today is Gandhi’s birthday. My roommates ask me if I know who he is, smirking as they poke the helpless American, a test and a joke. I am almost offended that they might think I don’t know who he is, parts of me want to ask back, do you know who Gandhi is? It is just a question and it is meant to test me in part but they mean well. Still, this question screams of a deeper problem: no one knows how to relate to me, understand what I am doing, or how I am here. Sometimes the phrasing of this fellowship is hollow despite its best intention to sloganize our work here, and yet there is no resonance at all, from hollow language or my attempts to tell people what I am doing. American Jewish World Services (AJWS) has devolved into just another acronym, pronounced like ‘address’ with a j instead of the double d sound. That I could be a college graduate who has read about Gandhi, who is understanding of his message and sympathetic to the people he tried to uplift just does not register with my roommates or anyone else I meet, the culture of my good will butting heads with the dominant culture of this city.

This morning’s paper features some op-eds on Gandhi’s vision, but below the fold on the front cover is a half-page expose on the growing brand equity of Gandhi’s likeness. Yesterday’s front page, above the fold, in the place that journalism school says is the lay out space for the most important news, showcased the growing trend among Ahmedabad’s wealthiest of upgrading from BMWs and Mercedes Benzs to Rolls Royces and Bentleys. The wealthiest city in one of India’s wealthier states, Ahmedebad and I are not getting along: it is pompous, opulent, and pimpled with massive shopping malls.

On Sunday night my roommates and I went out for dinner. We ate a wonderful Gujarati thali (the best meal I’ve had thus far) and after paying half of us ‘went for fun’ and the other half went home. Entirely unsure of what ‘go for fun’ meant I was excited to find out and too excited from our meal to go back to the apartment and sit in front of the blaring TV. We cruised and cruised some more, eventually parking at the lake near our house. Crowded with young people like us doing the same thing, I realized this is the fun for a Sunday night: to sit by the lake, watch people, drink a soda. Gujarat is a dry state so there are no bars, but the posturing young men leaned on their motorbikes and slowly sipped their cokes with the same suave that a true ladies man leans on the bar and sips his tequila sunrise. We don’t talk to anyone we don’t know, stare at girls who ride by, and balance our weight somehow so that we look really really cool. I have not hair gel and realize that no matter what I do I just can’t look cool, besides, my clothes would never be accepted by the in crowd. Worst of all, I didn’t drown myself in body spray before leaving the apartment.

My eyes glaze over, hypnotized by the bright neon lights, and I flashback to nights in high school wandering the streets, eating pizza, not talking to girls, trying to untuck my shirt in the coolest way possible. The last time I used body spray was sophomore year in high school, the same year I got wasted drinking at Guy Cerino’s, the same year I used to hang out in Pelham and cruise around on bikes. Slowly, I fade back to reality, and my roommates are still looking really cool. All around us there are adverts for the latest bollywood film; India produces over 1,000 movies a year and the ones that I have seen are bad, dominated by product placement, corny looking guys, really beautiful women, and bad too-practiced facial expressions of heartbreak.

Of all the commercials I’ve seen, the one that sticks in my mind all the time is not the Nivea skin bleaching cream but the other one, the one that concludes its 30 second spot on making your skin whiter with its unforgettable slogan: “Evolve.”

I would rather be hanging out with the sewage workers I met last week. People who speak only Gujarati, people I can’t communicate with in words but smile and laugh with, people I admire for the work in their hands, for what I know they do, for the fact that they are organizing to better their lives, because they are real. Parts of me know that the typical-young-person-in-the-developing-world thing to do is emote in such a way, but I can’t help myself, I am overwhelmed by the thought of what they do, their ability to keep on, to be so nice to me, to greet me and ask if I am married, to tell jokes, to sing songs, to sit through a three day training. Throughout the training I sat there, trying to understand, but more just scanning the room and taking it all in, the power of the sarees, the strength in their voices – a certain understanding of the injustices committed against them – a TB cough, warm smile. These people, not Amitabh Bachan, are who I would like to spend more time with.

This seems drastic and of course part of it has to do with my unrealistic romantic notions that I can solve people’s problems but I am in the process of trying to find that balance, that comfortable middle ground of people who understand why I am here and hold similar personal politics, but people who I can also speak to, hang out with in a city that must have cool parts to its personality.

Minority Report

It has always been a topic of conversation, an obvious symptom for a deeper problem rooted in American history and culture, discussed throughout high school, dominant in workshops, trainings and roundtables throughout college. Liberal politics in mind, I never placed blame, often organized the events, and tried to articulate answers in an attempt towards change, to make others understand. But, I never had an experiential understanding of these issues, and despite my best efforts couldn’t answer from a real place. Living here, I understand.

Why do all the black kids sit together? How come all the Asians won’t chill with anyone else? When you walk on campus, it looks like defacto segregation, there is little mixing. For as much lipservice as we give to race relations, why don’t more people mingle across racial lines?

I have friends from all over and try to answers these questions in the way I live my life. But, as a white man in the United Stated my behavior is rarely questioned, I usually look like everyone else, my behavior is not seen as anathema of norms, representative of my people, counter productive to social progress, or problematic. Those questions inevitably focus on groups who don’t look like me.

Walking around the streets here, people stare. They laugh. Kids point and giggle, wide-eyed. Riding my bicycle home from work is like comedy hour. I don’t speak the language, and I am not fluent in the culture. Rickshaw drivers hiss at me. Horns honk. Really, I have no idea what is going on, feel like a foreigner in a foreign land, and have not seen another white person in two weeks. People approach me and ask me stupid questions about America based on stupid movies, waiting for me to answer the question on behalf of 300 million people. The food is different. It is hotter than god and I sweat constantly. There is no one to date.

In trying to draw parallels back to the US, my newly minted minority status’ application stops here. There is too much history, the stereotypes that apply to me are generally considered good (having money chief among then) not bad despite my desire to be separate from them. Above all, it is just pretentious to think you can understand other people’s struggles and what I face is hardly struggle, it is just me in a new place. But, if I walked into a cafeteria right now I would sit with the people who looked like me.