I’ll Get My Own Spoon, Thank You: Labor, Population and Employment in India

(Written January 2)

I was sitting in Dadi and Dadaji’s front lawn, drinking tea and reading the Atlantic under the coconut palms, when I wondered what made this place, Saumya’s grandparents’ house, so incredibly relaxing. It felt like an all-inclusive resort. Our daily pattern was: get up – early morning chai – breakfast – do whatever – noon chai – 2 pm lunch – nap – do whatever – 4 pm chai – do whatever – 6 pm snack/dinner – 8 pm chai (?) – 10 pm dinner. A pretty packed schedule. And soon enough a pretty packed waistline as well, with sugary, milky chai four times a day that came with “biscuits” (cookies).

And If I Don’t See You – Good Afternoon, Good Evening and Good night! – Chai is a 24 hour affair. Dadaji: “If there is nothing to do – have tea.”

Dadaji chillin’ in the front yard – where we’d spend most of our time in Patna.

And it was clear enough: servants. There were probably half a dozen people gainfully employed under Dadi’s (grandmother’s) roof: a cook, a driver, a go-to-guy for anything, a handyman, an old man who raised Saumya and her father who had basically retired from doing much but stayed on the payroll, and an additional cook hired to feed the fat raging hordes of Americans that had descended, locus-like upon this place.

DadI: “Eat something!” (continual exhortation, even when eating)

I was sitting at the table once, doing something, and felt like I could really use some chai (it must have been around 8am, noon, 4pm or 8pm). And literally the next thing that happened was Ramu, one of the servants, walked in with a  tray of tea. Is he telepathic?

There are a lot of people in India. About a billion, give or take a couple tens of millions. A lot of those people live in big cities, and more come each year. The rural population is experiencing a drain on their youth, as they give up farming and move to the cities to find jobs. And a lot of those people end up working as servants in middle-class and upper-class homes, doing odd jobs or trying to sell things. (On a side-note, the door-to-door market here is huge: door-to-door cotton candy salesman, door-to-door carpet salesman, door-to-door kitchen pot salesman, door-to-door masseuse, door-to-door purchaser of old newspaper for recycling, door-to-door guy who irons your clothes for you). Labor is so cheap here because of the tremendous population looking for work, that even middle class families can afford a couple servants to help out around the house.

It’s a really complicated thing, this system. The initial reaction by most Americans is one of resistance to being served. As a nation we have a strong independent streak, so we are afraid of dependency. Someone clearing your plate from the table instead of taking it to the sink yourself seems awkward. Having someone walking behind you carrying your shopping bags seems shameful. Waiting for a servant to bring a spoon from the next room instead of just getting it yourself seems silly. But it’s how things are done here. Americans would probably bristle at this idea of someone serving you like that; they’d probably make quick and thoughtless comparisons to slavery, that shameful scar on our collective past. To those who had not really experienced the relationship between servants and their employers here, that may seem like what’s going on, but there is much more to it.

The important thing to think about is the alternative for these people. If they lived in these rural villages they’d have little (or no) electricity or water. We drove by some of these small towns and their grinding poverty. Rickety shelters made of torn-open rice sacks, or palms, or dried bamboo, with of a roof of a tarp or plastic sheeting. The measly fire in the dirt in front of the house and the steaming pot with hopefully something for breakfast. Barefoot children in the road chasing goats with sticks. Men idly talking in small circles, smoking cigarettes. Defecating in the creek. Malnutrition. Limited schooling. Spending afternoons plastering wet cow dung onto sunny walls to dry it for fuel to cook dinner. And I’m making no attempt here to tug at the heart strings – this is much the reality, as I have seen it and as I’ve been told.

Working as servants they get out of rural poverty and have a chance to make a better life for their children, who can often get to school more easily in towns than in the countryside. Better access to medical care, employment, etc.

And the servants become a quasi-extension of the family. The old man who shuffled around the house, doing no appreciable work still had a “job” that paid him something in a country with a limited safety net for retirees. While not entirely charity, his continued employment speaks to that fact that there is real gratitude for the work he did over fifty years ago to raise Saumya’s dad and later Saumya herself. Saumya’s family is also helping to pay for the education of some of their servants’ children. Members of her family are pitching in to make sure the next generation would have more opportunity to improve themselves. Her family may be a huge anomaly, but I would not be surprised if it indicates a larger trend.

This positive feedback loop is literally transforming the world. The story of the last forty years (and the next forty, at least), will be the dramatic alleviation of poverty for hundreds of millions of people. This is happening most dramatically in India and China, but in other parts of the developing world as well. The hungry and destitute are becoming poor but not hungry, the poor are becoming working class, the working class are becoming middle class, etc. And this huge sucking sound, that inexorable demand for Earth’s resources, is attributable to this increasing living standard as well. Steel, coal, rubber, water: pump it, smelt it, ship it, burn it. The resources and energy required to lift a third of the planet’s population out of poverty. And meet their new demands for more consumer goods.

Going from under a dollar a day to a dollar a day, or going from a dollar a day to two dollars a day may not seem like much to us. But that increase doubles their income. And counts for something. A long way to go, of course, but it is a major advancement.

I’m still thinking a lot about this system and the people here, about the economy and about the population and labor and what it all means. I haven’t come to any grand conclusions yet. I think it’s complicated. I think the general trend is positive, in the alleviation of poverty, despite the intimidating urban, environmental and social challenges it brings. I think this dynamic, the alleviation of extreme poverty and the slow expansion of a global middle class, will be the driving force in the world for this century. Let’s hope we have the collective courage to meet the new challenges that it brings.

“I Choo-Choo-Choose You”–Train Travel in India (long post)

(Written January 2)

We’ve taken a couple of pretty epic train rides here in India, that are experiences probably worthy of a post. Our first was in southern India, from Chennai to Alleppey, where we would enjoy lounging around on a houseboat in the backwaters of the state of Kerala. Our second train ride was from Patna, where we stayed with Saumya’s grandparents for a week, to Delhi.

When we got out of the cab at the train station at Chennai, my Developing World Safety Alarms kicked up to about Defcon 2. The jostling crush of people (Brain: PICKPOCKETS!), the groups of men lazily leaning against the wall, eyeing the people passing by (Brain: LOOKING FOR TARGETS - TARGETS!), the child beggars (Brain: DISTRACTIONS FOR TO MORE EASILY ROB YOU WITH, MY DEAR!). From inside the protective walls of our cab, I nerdily recalled Alec Guinness’s classic dry delivery of Obi Wan Kenobi: “Mos Eisley Space Port – you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” I shoved all my money and my passport and credit cards into my under-the-clothes money belt (Saumya calls it my “Mormon underwear”). I probably would have put my laptop and iphone in there too if they would have fit. I carried my bag in front of me and tried to open up my peripheral vision to 270 degrees. Which, it turns out, did not help me read the departure board written in Tamil.

We found our car and our berth. The car’s long main corridor had a series of two berths along the long side and more communal areas (“coupes”) with four berths, setup with a lower and upper berth. We had an unconfirmed reservation that got bumped to a waitlist, so our three berths (for Saumya & Dave and I) got downgraded to two. A college-age Indian woman and her mother joined us sitting on the two lower berths waiting for the TT (Ticket Taker). A silent, heavily mustachioed Indian man in cheap polyester brown pants and a tan button-up shirt sat across from me and tried to hide his curiosity (alternatively, boredom).

The TT came by and looked at our tickets. He may be my favorite stranger on the trip so far. A thin man, he was dressed in a blue blazer, white pants (white!), a red tie and white dress shirt whose cuffs extended well beyond his coat. He had thin hair, carefully parted and greased down, and a pair of spectacles that through some miracle or magic balanced ever so carefully from the end of his nose. He had the air of an experienced (but unpretentious) butler whose radical economy of speech and motion had been pared down to the absolute functional minimum. Like some very stoic and quiet Saint Peter, in his arms he carried an enormous ledger that held a thick stack of sheets printed on dot-matrix paper (dot matrix!). He looked at our tickets, flipped through the tome, found us and carefully noted our attendance. A bureaucrat to the n-th degree, he took his job tremendously seriously. Saumya politely asked if we could extend our ticket from Kochi to Alleppey (some part of the downgrade process also changed our final destination, so we would only go most of the way. Fascinating.) He said “I will return.” Regally he rose from our bunk and glided silently through the curtains. We giggled and giggled about how cool this guy was. Having completed his circuit down the train, he returned the way he came. As he passed by, Saumya said “Sir?” He turned, peeking his head in between the curtains, and said “Madam, I will return.” He did, too, this miraculous piece of work of a man, this wondrously efficient cog of the bureaucracy! He came back with the Eternal Ledger and consulted a long table of destinations, times and prices. He flipped to the back of his book and made a series of handwritten calculations, amid his other calculations for different customers. “Madam, the additional fare to Alleppey will be two hundred and fifty six rupees per head.” Saumya: “Per head?” TT: “Yes, ma’am, per head.” After a pause he clarified, “Per person.”

He also was on the case so we could get another berth, so Dave and Saumya could have separate bunks. Around midnight I got woken up and found the TT with Saumya in the hallways, trying to get a separate berth along the side, apart from Saumya and Dave, for me. He explained that the pair of pushy, nosy British women who interacted with us while boarding kindly requested that we surrender our berth to them (they were waitlisted and did not have a seat and were not supposed to even have boarded the train). I’ve never seen someone so politely say in between the lines that “Ma’am, please tell me ‘no.’” This TT was a Jedi, a ninja. “It is not required, madam,” he tells Saumya. “It is their request. But you have your berth.” This guy was a master. We kept our berth. His subtly was so nuanced Saumya didn’t even catch it until I mentioned it later.

Our car was class “Second AC,” which is one down from first class. In Third AC you had six people in the coupe with you, with the berths stacked three deep. But you still had AC. In the standard sleeper you had six people and no AC. In the final car I think it was mostly fend for yourself (ie, stand, sit, lie down as you can).

The bathroom was another experience entirely. I had gotten used to “hole in the ground” latrines in Panama. I have never experienced a “hole in the floor” bathroom on a moving train. That was literally all there was. You could look down and see the tracks racing by under you. (I was later told that people who live by railroads generally relieve themselves on the railroad tracks, probably because the trains are already indiscriminately discharging their waste there). Beside the hole there were two small elevated platforms for your feet, a water sprayer and a cup (this is the standard Indian-style (vs. Western Style) toilet in India). There was a sink and mirror with soap. I am not sure of the mechanics of how Indian-style toilets work (with just water how do you dry off? Do you walk around with wet undies?). And I can’t imagine the physics of trying to do this on a swaying, starting and stopping train. As Nick, Dave’s brother, later would wax philosophical, “I was trying to figure out how the physics of that transaction would be possible.”

I couldn’t resist – it’s an innate Peace Corps Volunteer response: “Take me to your toilet!” What you can’t see are the railroad ties whipping by through the hole…

Once I got my shoulder-width wide upper berth to myself, separated from the incessant fluorescent hallway lighting by a thin blue curtain, I managed to get a decent amount of sleep. I would sleep in approximately two-hour increments, roll over and doze back off again. The berth was beyond time. I had no idea what time it was because I left my iPhone in my bag and there was no window. I would occasionally peak my head out the curtains and look to see if other people were waking up. If not, back to sleep.

Saumya came by around 6 AM (becoming quickly our standard wake-up time). I was sitting up and writing in my journal, fresh as a daisy (short lived! such a short-lived daisy!). We all got back together in our shared coupe and watched the tropical landscape go by as the sun came up. Vendors went up and down the train cars hawking their breakfast food. We had some terrible idly and sambar (the soupy sambar came tepid in a plastic bag) and a couple of fried vadas (deep fried, dense chickpea-based savory donuts) that had been fried hours ago. A man walked down the car carrying a silver coffee urn saying “koppee, koppee, koppee.” We got a Doctors’ Office Pee Cup sized-cup of super-sugary, super-milky coffee made, I think, with Nescafe instant. He walked by at least seven times. Saumya’s second cup, on his eighth circuit, was attributed to his perseverance.

The Land Beyond Time: Second AC berth - More comfortable than you’d expect!

Our second train trip, post-Patna, with Dave and Saumya’s combined families, was quite different because we were rolling in First Class. The “kids” quickly seceded from the parents to found an independent a “Kids Coupe” (Dave, Nick, Saumya and I). A magical transformation had occurred between Second AC and First Class. The thin curtain that separated us from the main hallway had been transformed into a thin wall with a sliding door (with lock!) and curtain. There was about an extra eight inches on each side of the berths, which made a big difference. Over the speakers we were feted with horrendous music of such poor sound quality that it sounded like a bleating/dying/birthing goat (the volume was quickly dropped to zero). Our fresh sheets were delivered in a brown paper bag to ensure their freshness (because they’re in a bag – come on!). We were served chai immediately after boarding, on a small collapsible table (this is new). We had a full dinner (six options?!?) that included a butterscotch ice cream cup as dessert. The food was a big step-up from the airplane food that I had expected: spicy, flavorful and filling. And on a whole different level from fend-for-yourself/maybe-there’s-a-dude-selling-cold-sambar mentality of Second AC. After the dinner an attendant cleaned the floor with a rag and a spraybottle. A different attendant came in to make our beds. What luxury!

Traveling in First AC is just like the sugar they give you – Superfine!

Hot and Sour Soup on First AC comes with crackers: Or, Bake and Cake (we didn’t have to do either)

Having boarded the overnight train on the evening of December 31, we rang in 2012 with our First Class snores on a train in India bound for Delhi.

The Road: A Space Between Spaces

(Written January 2, 2012)

Written while sitting on a six-hour bus ride from Delhi to Jaipur. Expect to write a number of posts here and then spam them when I find wi-fi. Saumya is in the backseat explaining the intricacies of Indian familial naming conventions. Auntie is reading a novel in the front seat. Everyone else is basically watching the foggy world of Delhi in winter whip by.

We’re “back", in a sense. We landed in Delhi two weeks ago and flew out the next morning to Chennai, in southern India. We spent a week touring in the south and then took a flight up to northeastern India to Saumya’s grandparents house in Patna, the capital of the state of Bihar. We spent a week there with her family and then took a fourteen hour overnight train ride to Delhi over new years (we left in the evening on Dec. 31, slept through the new year and arrived yesterday in Delhi). We did some touristy stuff in Delhi yesterday (Red Fort, Gate of India, Parliament, President’s house, Humayun’s Tomb, etc). We had a delightfully carnivorous meal last night at a place called Kharim’s, a middle eastern tandoori place in a crowded and dirty but somehow quaint Muslim neighborhood in Delhi. After a week of mostly vegetable dishes (of unbelievable quality and quantity) at Dadi and Dadaji’s house (Saumya’s grandparents), the transition to so much meat has our collective stomachs doing the mambo.

I think it was appropriate that I was traveling in India during Advent, the season of waiting (not just “for Christmas” as most believe, but also for the eschaton, the end of time, the second coming of Christ). I have spent a lot of time waiting. I thought the other day that we have become so used to long times traveling and waiting that now most any other travel we could eat for breakfast. Fourteen hour flight. Six hour bus ride. Fifteen hour train ride. The concept of time almost changes. I have realized how much I really enjoy when the passage of time is synced to the passage of space. Our flight was fourteen hours long, but we went 8,000 miles. It was a long flight. But we were going a long way. In the States, a two hour flight to Chicago takes five hours with getting to the airport, security, waiting, delays, arrival, deplaning, baggage claim, etc. The travel doesn’t seem slow enough. You’re always moving, except for those two brief (relaxing?) hours in the air. Here these long journeys give you time to really mentally settle into the waiting. To the passage of time. And look out the window: the passage of space. There is a more serious contact with reality on the ground instead of in the air. Cars. People. Men peeing by the side of the road (O, if I had a nickel!). Hotels. Road signs. Power lines. Motorcycles.

But mostly I’m enjoying the time required in travel. Touring can be an intense experience. So much to see and to do in so little time. To “take advantage of being here.” And then we make choices to get to the next place as fast as possible. The flight instead of the train, train instead of the bus, etc. Then the time “between places,” on the road, between spaces, in itself becomes a new space. The space of the road.

“There is No Cherai Beach” - Reflections on the “Global South”

(Written Dec. 26)

More and more I find myself remarking, probably to Dave and Saumya’s (slight?) irritation, how things here remind me of Panama, or how things here are like how things are in Panama. I try to limit it because I’ve noticed it and have become self-conscious about it. I don’t want to be the Panamanian equivalent of “This one time, at band camp….”

But there are a lot of similarities I’ve noticed, so I’ve kept a list. Here’s the current one, which has both the abstract and the mundane:

• Trash. There is no municipal trash pick up (as far as I can tell). Instead, trash is thrown into the street or collected and burned. The toxic fumes released by the burning plastic have a distinctly acrid odor. In the evening, or whenever several families are burning their trash simultaneously can get particularly suffocating. The air burns with pollution you can feel.
• Regulation and Rules. There is a conspicuous lack of oversight, rules, regulations, etc. A lot of the ones I’ve noticed are related to health and safety. There are always seat belts, but the short end to fasten it is often shoved back into the seat cushions, irretrievable except to the most fastidious adherent to safety. Men ride on top of trucks with enormous shifting loads, holding on by a rope or a rail. Three teenage boys ride on a motorcycle. Food is sold in the street, literally, in baskets or in tarps that are lying on the ground. I doubt there is much food inspection, etc. The chemicals that are allowed here I am sure are present at more toxic levels than are allowed in the US. Posters and ads cover every available surface of buildings, both residential and commercial. Traffic is a free-for-all (cops are mostly ignored). Bribery and corruption exist on many levels and is often complained about (even though I’ve not experienced any directly).
• “Cold Weather.” It’s maybe 65 degrees here in Patna, Bihar. The high is probably 73 or so. In the early morning it may get to the high 50s. People dress here like they are about to ascend Everest, though. It reminded me of Panamanians bundling up in 60 degree weather, with hats and scarfs and winter gloves.
• Broken Glass on Top of Walls. People embed intimidating shards of broken glass into the tops of the walls around their homes and businesses. Cheap security, these green, blue and clear teeth look ready to relieve a potential burglar of a quart of blood.
• The Answer is Always Yes. We get this a lot, especially when the language barrier is more pronounced. A variation on this is The Ambiguous Response. For example, we asked for directions to a local beach at the front desk of our hotel. The exchange:
  • Us: “Do you know where Cherai Beach is?”
    Hotel employee: “Cherai Beach.” (Not a question. A flatly-delivered repetition).
  • Us: “Yes, Cherai Beach. Do you know where it is?”
  • Employee: “There is no Cherai Beach.”
  • Us: “But our guidebook says it’s nearby, though. You don’t know where it is?”
  • Employee: “It is here.” (Points to map, indicating the entire local coastline).
  • Us: “But our book says it should be up here.”
  • Employee: “It is right here” (Leans over, squints dramatically and tries to find something with the tip of his pen in the downtown area. Determines a very specific spot to answer us).
  • Us: “Our guidebook says we have to take a ferry to get there, and that is just off the main road. We have to go one island over and drive for thirty kilometers.”
  • Employee: “There is no Cherai Beach there.” (Turns to maintenance guy leaning on counter, there is a lively exchange in Tamil)
  • Employee: “Oh, that Cherai Beach. Yes, it’s up there, about thirty kilometers” (what our guidebook originally said – no new information gained in a wasted ten minute exchange).
• Beating Clothes On A Rock. Women will stand in the river and thwack their clothes against a rock. Or they will smack them with a broad wooden paddle. They rub detergent into the clothes before doing this. Think about this the next time you use the laundry machine.
• Stray animals. Hideous, starved dogs were a constant fixture in Panama. Here they seem less physically abused and maybe even (well?) fed. Here of course, cows and water buffalo do roam the streets freely. I can’t imagine how these city cows carry on conversations with country cows, though. I also don’t know what they eat: there is very little grass here that hasn’t been trampled by constant cricket games. Driving to a church on Christmas Day in a failed attempt to find an English-language services, we were barred from entrance to the church by a bellowing and quite angry water buffalo. Our driver leaned on the horn and the beast irritably lumbered off to the side.
• “The Tienda.” I don’t know what the Hindi word is for these, but they are like little general stores you can find anywhere. No corporations or CVS’s though, chains here are something you buy, not where you buy things. You can get everything from cookies to machetes to school uniforms here. In India they are remarkably small: some I’ve seen are not much bigger than 10x10, 10x20, etc.
• Single Serving Everything. You can buy things in single servings. A single pen, a single cookie, a single band-aid, a single diaper. Pretty convenient, actually.
• School Uniforms. Kids out of school in their white and blue or white and brown uniforms. I guess uniforms never really caught on at public schools in the US.
• Mosquito Coils. I guess these exist in the US too. Quite useful. Probably carcinogenic.
• Excessiveness of Advertising. Everything is covered in ads. Ads for toothpaste and luxury silks to ads for your local politician or cellular service provider. The Political Poster With Awkwardly Photographed Local (Often Unsmiling) Representative seems to be a developing-world meme. Ads hang from awnings, are plastered on sandwich boards in the street or against concrete walls in a long duplicative series, in massive billboards against the front or side of buildings, or are hung up in stores.
• Grandma Has Elbows and Knows How to Use Them. In Panama if you weren’t careful, the tiny indigenous old ladies would push you out of the way to get on the bus ahead of you. I’ve had lots of people cut me off in lines here. You have to push and shove to get what you want. I was in line to get tickets to a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a man cut directly in front of me and stood maybe four inches behind the next person. I unfortunately made the rookie error of giving the person in front of me TWO FEET of breathing room. I won’t make that mistake again. In India this aggressive, pushy (to Americans) me-first attitude makes more sense, given the massive population and the limited space. In Panama, with a population density roughly of South Carolina, it makes much less sense to me.
• Little Regard For Those Who Are Sleeping. I noticed this this morning. There were four of us sleeping on cots in a hallway and around 6 am people started moving around, talking to each other, opening and closing doors, making the tea, etc. This was a distinct feature in Panama as well: in an open, busy house with multiple generations and few substantial walls, when the first person woke up in the house (at 4:30 AM), there was little regard for the sleeping. You can’t have a “library voice” if you’ve never been to a library.

More to come on what is really distinctly Indian…

Sidewalks Optional, Cheating Death Not

(Written Dec. 23)

India is somewhat infamous for its crowded streets, chaotic traffic patterns and hell-bent, survivalist drivers. So I expected some thrill, some danger, some chaos.

I had no idea.

In traffic here things are perfect chaos. I think that is the right term. It is perfect, in a sense. The mad harmony of constant merging and passing and honking and cutting each other off. The drunken ballet of near-death experiences.

The roads are the city’s arteries and veins and they are truly alive with a bristling variety of wheeled (and unwheeled) things. Pedestrians cut off bicyclists and pedaled rickshaws while enormous dump trucks barrel past cabs and the miniature three wheeled “autos” (auto-rickshaw). The bicycles seem to all be custom jobs, the biodiversity so high that not one of them is the same in this thriving Darwinian transportation jungle. Some are long with racks on the back, while others lead with an enormous flat bed for carrying goods; many have four or five propane tanks slung across the back wheel, pedaling through this dance of death like some kind of two wheeled kamikaze. Their potential combustibility does not seem to deter aggression against them - clearly their evolutionary advantage is only slight in this survival-of-the-fittest cage-match. I’ve noticed the “pedicab” model does seem standard here, though, with two forward-facing seats (or rather room for two or three or seven on a forward-facing bench) with a  second bench in the back facing whatever is tailgating the pedicab (a ulcer-causing point of view, I’d imagine). There is a single bar across the back bench, I suppose to limit the inconvenience of people sliding off the back bench and into someone’s windshield.

No one seems very in control of this insanity, either. Traffic lights are installed in some major intersections, but often are not working, ignored entirely by drivers, or superseded by brown-uniformed police officers who direct traffic flow. Blow through red lights, force your way in, regardless if they are letting you in (or not, as if often the case). These traffic lights and formal, striped lanes are ghosts: neither believed in nor in any way able to affect the actual functioning of the real world. They are the hollow, meek “thou shalt”s of a feeble state trying to tame a restless beast.

The road is a space. It is not a series of parallel, equally sized lanes that can contain one vehicle at the time. The road is a space. Or really, the road is space. It is a kind of cosmic vastness without boundary or border, where all vectors of travel are simultaneously possible. The rule of thumb: if you can fit, you will fit. There is no void, no openness in this space, however. It is packed, dense. Heavy particles, these massive dump-truck protons, lumber slowly through it, while speedier and more restless electron bicycles, motorcycles and “autos” buzz and spin and whirl around everyone all the time, seeking some gap in the denseness to rush ahead. The bicycles and motorcycles pass the autos, who pass the cars, who pass the trucks, who pass the buses. This is the liquid hierarchy of traffic flow in India.

There is a kind of miraculous joy to this traffic, and even a kind of efficiency. The miraculous joy in that (so far) we have not been in or seen any traffic accidents of any kind. I am sure I’m drifting into the wildly anecdotal here, and I am sure if I googled India traffic statistics, I’d be appalled (thank you lack of internet connection). But no one seems to get hit or hurt. Most traffic backups are caused by seven vehicles trying to fit down a space for three or by a mechanical failure. Speed does temper the lunacy and probably helps prevent the fatal accidents we have in the US. In this turgid flow of people and machines, you can’t get much about twenty or thirty miles an hour. Once, out of town and free of congestion, I think we may have hit 40. Maybe not.

Americans’ sense of space is vast. The plains stretch on endlessly in their flat monoculture until the mountains rise up and then crash into the ocean. Our history is one of settlement and expansion and the seemingly limitless availability of yet further westward land. We drive with much the same feeling of space. We need fifteen to thirty feet in front of us and behind us, or you’re tailgating or being tailgated. At least five to six feet is required on the left and right sides of the car or someone is cutting you off. In India, all of those dimensions have been shrunk vastly. If you can fit, you will fit. It is as if everyone drives with a two-inch force field around all sides of their vehicle, be it bicycle or cab or truck or bus: no one gets past those two inches, but also anyone can get right up against those two inches.

The perverse kind of efficiency comes from every single square inch of the space being filled by someone on/in something. If you had a country that contained 20% of the world’s population and that needed to get places occasionally, you’d probably want your roads as full as possible as well.

The other thing is the honking. The horn here is not an emergencies-only signal that you’re stopping quickly or that someone did something really stupid. It’s a way to say hello. “Hi, I’m over here behind you!” “Hi, I’m still over here behind you!” “Oh, look now, I’m on your right – Hello!” “I’m passing you now to go some place faster – see you later!” Each sentence is a honk. Multiply by one billion.

Hinduism is an extremely open and pluralistic religion; it accepts and welcomes most perspectives and the wisdom of other religious traditions. Mohammed and Jesus are honored as prophets and sages. If I lived here and had to drive (or walk or bike for that matter), I’d be praying to whoever in the heavens was working the late-night hotline shift as well.

Tiger Prawns, Ben Hur on Steroids, and the Smell of Carcinogens in the Morning: Initial Impressions of India

(Written Dec. 22)

I don’t know how it got to be this way, but it’s already Day Five of my trip to India with Saumya and Dave, good friends and former neighbors. Well, it’s gotten to be Day Five because we’ve been busy running from place to place, fending off jet lag with a  quiet desperation (and many power naps and cups of coffee), etc. Also, a silence due to a lack of internet connection. I should start typing things out offline and then posting them in a mad rush when I can get wi-fi access. Expect: silence, silence, silence – TORRENT.

India! It’s still hard to believe I’m in India. There is a lot to write about. Too much. I’ll try to send out periodic updates and keep my posts to a measurable and sane size. No promises though.

Initial impressions, maybe? Start there? I could walk you through Days One Through Five, but the narrative slog seems a bit daunting right now. Maybe I can close with Highlights of The Trip Thus Far.

Initial Impressions. Wow. I was not ready for this. Well, in a sense I sort of was. Two years living in Panama with Peace Corps got me ready for a lot of this “developing world” stuff. And I see a lot of similarities between the two countries. I’m making a list of some of those things (future post - yes, sure, I’ll promise it). But India is also clearly its own thing.

The first thing I noticed about India after leaving baggage claim in Delhi was the air. Walking out of the terminal, we could see the cloudy, murky fog. Or smog. It was hard to tell which. I was told both. The air had a kind of thickness and mass to it; it would cling. What did TS Eliot say about the fog in Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, as a cat rubbing its back against a window-pane? The air burned with a smoky acridity. It smelled like smoldering campfire. And indeed, as we drove out of the airport with bags loaded on top of the car, I saw several small fires with heavy black plumes of smoke. The memory of the smell came back, from Panama. Burning plastic. Dioxin. Oh how I love the smell of carcinogens in the morning!

Traffic. My God. I will have to do an entire post on this. But imagine the chariot race scene from Ben Hur with a billion people on mopeds honking all the time. I think this is the one-sentence way to get you there to what this is like. I’ve never experienced anything like this driving. Please-Don’t-Watch-These-Mom videos coming soon…

Food. Wondrous. Everywhere everything all the time wondrous. There is some terribly tragic irony that the culture with some of the best food in the world had to submit for many decades to the culture with some of the worst food in the world. You would think with all the buckets of money the Brits were hauling out of India through the spice trade they would have at least actually used some of the spices in their food. Oh well. But I digress. We have eaten like kings and queens. I expect this trend to continue onward ever upward. Once we go to Patna, Saumya’s home town, I am told to expect an endless train of food that will leave me horribly, horribly inept at returning to the US and my routine of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch everyday.

People. Millions. Literally. Tons of people. Everywhere. For a sense of scale: take everyone in the United States. Multiply them by four. Now put them in a space about the size of the land east of the Mississippi. That’s India. Crowded. Loud. Honking. My God, the honking (see traffic, above).

Not as “developed” as I thought it would be. I had expectations that since India is part of the BRIC bloc of developing nations (along with Brazil, Russia and China) that there would be a sense of sophistication and ease that you’d anticipate with a middle-income country. Clearly India is way down the road to getting there, but is not there yet. No one talks about Panama, since it’s so off the radar and they simply don’t have tens of millions of people to raise out of poverty. But the rich-poor, development-index scale in my head was skewed toward “India wealthier than Panama” so far has not panned out in an appreciable way. I am sure that if I had seen India ten years ago, before they were clocking a 9% GDP growth rate for a decade, I would be floored by the improvement. And surely there is a very strong and strengthening middle class here that will be a strong civic foundation for the world’s largest democracy.

Highlights, thus far. Definitely yesterday and last night, which we spent on a houseboat lazily drifting through the “backwaters” of the state of Kerala, in southern India. Clear blue skies, warm weather, the gentle smacking of the water against the side of the boat, the rustle of the coconut palms, epic feasting on fresh seafood, including several tiger prawn, which are the Shaquille O’Neals of shrimp, at about a pound each and the length of your forearm. Another, odd highlight may be the fourteen hour overnight train ride to Alleppey, for our houseboat experience. Probably deserves its own post. A fascinating travel experience. In addition, a long, long list of little details that have been accumulating that may be of some interest. I’ll try to get those down in a semi-thorough way.

I think I’ve just promised about a half dozen posts. I better get on this.

Airborne, Looking Down at Constellations

I recently flew home for Thanksgiving, down to Charleston from DC. I do try to enjoy the miracle of flight. Walk into a room and sit down. They close the door. Two hours pass. You stand up and they open the door. You're in a new city, a new country. Sit down for seventeen hours and Chicago becomes Delhi. Remarkable. Caracas becomes Miami, becomes  Lucerne. Journeys that would have taken months, years, fly by (sorry) in a matter of hours. We went from feet to hooves to carriages to trains to cars to planes. What will the next breakthrough be? Our last step cut an eight hour car ride into a hour-plus flight. Will the next step proportionally reduce an hour-long flight into a seven and a half minute trip?

Numbed by our Blackberrys and the safety pantomime before takeoff, I think we've lost our sense of wonder at air travel, that we are in this metal tube blasting along in the ether at hundreds of miles an hour. I think about the math going on, the physics going on in the moment of takeoff. I wish I could see it. I wish I could look out the window and see the formulas and fractions flying by. Air pressure, wind velocity, thrust, gravity on the hull, friction on the tires, the weight of the passengers and their tubes of toothpaste in their carry-on luggage, the wind resistance and the aerodynamics. The tympani roll of the plane slowly gathering speed, the rumbling over the runway, the moment where the nose lifts, the pressure forces you down into your seat, and then the mystic moment when the back wheels no longer touch the earth. Upward thrust under the wings has exceeded the force of gravity. We are airborne.

I flew back to DC at night, over the Eastern seaboard, across South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. I had a window seat.

As we fly over our planet, I look down at the flecks of illumination in the inky sea of darkness below, the bright dabs and swirls, the luminescent dots and lines, these spiraling galaxies of white and orange and pale green lights in the blackness. The landscape below is bristling with light, sometimes lethargically, sometimes enthusiastically. The densely packed light in the distance weakens as it spreads out from its core, the steaming orange fallout from the light pollution atom bomb of a town.

I wonder what we are passing over: what is the name of this town? Is this the Walmart? The Moore's house? The Jiffy Lube? New Bethlehem Baptist Church? The Krogers? My generality at this distance above is countered by the real specificity of what is below.

It's basically uninterrupted. Shopping malls, roads, clusters of subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, parking lots and warehouses. It is not as bare and primeval as you would think it would be. Has sprawl consumed the whole world? Where are the back woods, the mountain cottages for our Thoreaus and shramanas (if there are any left)? I remember that amazing view of the Earth from space, the image of "the world at night" where it's so clear how everything east of the Mississippi is a broad and spidery web of stars, linked together by fine filaments and strands, some of the lights glowing hot and bright and white, these little incendiary stars, our cities laid out in constellations on the Earth's surface.

Are we copying the heavens? Are we laying on the Earth's surface our image of ourselves? Are we mocking the old constellations of crab and twins and bull? Praising them? What are the constellations we are making, in these lines between Tuscon and Birmingham and Charlotte and New Orleans? The Grande Latte? The Failed Marriage? The iPad 2? The Traffic Jam?

The ancients looked up at the heavens and counted the stars in awe, marking lines between them and seeing in the cosmos familiar forms from our planet. We moderns have done the opposite - we have looked down at our planet and painted it with lines of light and stars of our own invention. We have made constellations. We have created our own cosmos.