“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.