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.