I is for India

Do you remember the times in Sesame Street when a muppet would sound out a word? Often the syllables of the word were themselves puppets and they would move gradually together as the furry monster progressed from “hah ta” to “haht” to “hot,” by which point the letters had joined and, possibly, done something to illustrate their meaning, such as glowing with warmth, to continue the “hot” example. In my declining Sesame Street years I wasn’t that fond of these shorts. You see, big all-day-at-school kid that I was, I’d moved on to whole-word, as opposed to phonetic, mastery of most of your three letter words. (With the obvious exceptions of all those three letter words you learn only once you start doing crosswords, like “emu” and “ort.”) But now sounding out words is my new favorite travel game and it makes my rickshaw commutes to the National Archives seem almost short.

I like to sound out Hindi words because, although my vocabulary is fleetingly small, I do know the alphabet. I am sort of proud of that because the non-familiarity of the characters makes it feels like I’ve mastered some super secret code. Super secret meaning, in this case, that it is just the 500 million or so of us who know it. What makes sounding out particularly enjoyable is that so many words in Hindi—especially the sort of words that make it onto signs, like “metro” and “gate”—are transliterations of English words. So I’ll be going along, sounding out words that mean nothing to me and then there are these great epiphany moments when a word pops out of the sounds. Example: I’ll be reading along “dah-lee-poh-le-s” and, ureka!, that’s “Delhi police.”

For illustration, I include here the two kinds of signs I can read. Albert is Vanna White-ing the first type, which is a sign that is actually in English. It says “A Block.” Which is right next door to where I live, on B block. The second type of sign I can read, like the road sign here, contains Hindi proper nouns. Everything on the line in English is reproduced phonetically in Hindi, including “Captain.”

It is very interesting to notice what gets transliterated versus translated. For example, if you are standing on the Metro platform in Delhi, enjoying the deliciously well air-conditioned feel of the place, a sign on the wall tells you, in Hindi characters, to stay behind the “peelee” line, using the Hindi word for yellow. But the train you are about to board is called the “bahloo” line, transliterating “blue” instead of using “neelee,” the Hindi word for blue.

So, that’s what I’m doing for fun these days! Field work is an endless party, I tell you.

Random note: I have moved on from digestive biscuits to Bounty chocolate bars. I’ve had them before but I had forgotten how vastly superior they are to Mounds bars, which use the same basic coconut-wrapped-in-chocolate concept. This is because, first of all, the Bounty candy bar is slightly salty, which creates a nice counterpoint to all that sticky sweetness. And, second, they are quite a bit fatter. Possibly, if I had paid more attention to learning the metric system in middle school I would already have known 1 bounty > 1 mound.

Random note 2: I think that anyplace that is in the tropics and does not have reliable AC should avoid upholstered furniture. It can’t be washed without encouraging what is already a latent tendency to mold and, as a result, becomes extremely dusty and grim-covered. In fact, I think the most important question for most home purchases in this climate is “will I be able to prevent this object from supporting its own ecosystem?”

Random note 3: I have a cockroach living in my bathroom. I’ve known this for about a week but I was content to peacefully coexist since (a) he only came out at night and ran for cover whenever I turned on the light and (b) I don’t like hunting cockroaches because there is the possibility that, in its panic, your prey will do something gross like skitter across your feet. I also don’t like dealing with their distressingly large carcasses. However, yesterday the roach ran into the cupboard beneath the sink and I shut him in there. I now wonder if that wasn’t a cruel thing to do as stomping on him would have been a quicker end. But he won’t necessarily be starving, since that cupboard was hardly an antiseptic environment. And, also, I think the only way to really kill a cockroach is with basilisk venom or fiend fire, so he’s probably just really mad at me and especially likely to do something upsettingly disgusting if I let him out.

Welcome to the Neighborhood

This is the house where I live
The streets of Defence Colony - lots of trees!!
McMansion, India style
"Colony" refers to the fact that we are a (wrought-iron) gated community
And this is the major thru-fare beyond the colony

No, it's my turn!

It’s funny how it is the littlest things that breed cultural resentments, at least for me. I disapprove, in principle, of the numerous times during my day that rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers lie to me about what various things cost. But I don’t get worked up about it. And as for the tremendous human suffering of the children begging on Delhi’s street, I feel more humbled than outraged—I don’t know whether I should think of such poverty as part of India’s culture or only as something that is, at present, central to its economic life but might, in future, be eradicated without requiring any great transformation of public values.

On the other hand, I feel no sympathetic allowance for cultural difference when it comes to the subject of India and taking turns. No words are too strong for describing my disgust at the lack of a Indian taboo against queue-jumping.

I regard cutting in line as an act of the basest treachery. Perhaps this is my elementary school self reasserting itself—it occurs to me that the last time I really felt the etiquette of standing in line was worthy of a moral treatise I was wearing a plaid jumper and pigtails. (By the way, in Michigan we stand in a line, not on it. When I first heard “waiting on line” during my first week at college I thought it was a case of internet lingo being transferred to the physical world as a sort of hipster trend.) But I stand by my third-grade self’s overall impression of outrage at line cutters.

As I see it, cutting into line (or onto, if you prefer) is a brazen signal of the cutter’s contempt for his fellow queuewoman. It is a flat denial of respect for her personhood. Jumping into a queue where one does not deserve to be signals a devaluation of the principles of equality and justice that calls into question the cutter’s fitness for a civil and democratic society. In fact, it suggests strong fascist tendencies, if not actual votes for the BJP.

Say, for example, one is standing at a clerk’s desk in the Ministry of Home Affairs while the clerk speaks at great length to a friend about the injections she is having done in order to deal with pain in her wrists and hands. And someone else comes up to the counter and, instead of standing behind you in an orderly fashion, proceeds to stand beside you, at the counter, obscuring the order in which the two of you ought, by principles of fair play and sportsmanship, to be dealt with by the clerk. Then another person comes up and he, too, bellies up to the bar! And it’s a pan-gender problem, as a woman now walks to the desk and likewise stands at the counter as though she might very well be the most deserving of out of the four of you for the clerk’s immediate attention. Then, when the clerk has finished giving her medical history, she simply looks blandly at the panel of us, waiting to see who will most aggressively demand her attention. This is rather than using the powers vested in her by the Home Ministry, which executes the law of the land on behalf of the august Cabinet of India, to coldly stare down the queue-usurping rakes and deal with us in the order in which we arrived at her desk. I shouldn’t overstate this—the Home Ministry has developed an extremely complex number-assigning system to try to deal with its visitors fairly, but clearly this is the thin veneer of bureaucratic rationalism imposed over a whole culture of wanton line cutting.

My landlady’s daughter-in-law, by the way, drove this point home for me when she told me about going to Disney World and being absolutely dumbstruck at how many people were in the park, with none of them shoving or butting into lines. It had never occurred to me to wonder at this. Who would dare shove in the Happiest Place on Earth? The combined disapproving shock hundreds of Midwestern moms, all of them wearing outfits bespeaking great moral authority, like unflatteringly high-waisted shorts with tucked in t-shirts, would be enough shame even the most hardened social misfit.

Apparently, in preparation for the Beijing ’08 Olympics, the Chinese government is having once a month standing-in-line practice days. Now, that’s the kind of cultural engineering I can really get behind.

Yes, behind. Not in front, cutting in where I don’t belong.

Blogger Internal Conflict Revealed

So, I actually posted something for about 10 minutes yesterday, then, on second thought, decided it was too whiny and took it off my blog for fear the thing would start to read like one long gripe fest. (It's hard to write interesting entries without some citing some kind of adversity or confusion -- something to give a little narrative arch to the whole thing, you know?) But now, on third thought, I am thinking that the post is not so bad because it is more about what a nutter I am than anything about India. So, the post returns here, although admittedly edited somewhat to assuage my worries about sounding too much like a little black raincloud. (Anyone besides my sisters get that reference?)

Today’s post [read: Yesterday's post] comes from the department of things that are not as nice as I thought they would be. In this case: having a maid.

First, let me explain how housekeeping works in my building and, I believe, many other places as well. I live in a flat on the 3rd floor of a building—the landlord lives on the ground floor. She is a widow and her son lives on the second floor with his family and he is the property manager. There are maybe 6 or 7 tenants at any one time in the rest of the apartments in the building. The property manager and his family also have a little dachshund (not a redundancy: the dog is little even for a dachshund) named Mishti. Even more than the Baskin Robbins, you can tell my neighborhood is ritzy because there is a pet store in the market. A family has to have really arrived in order to have money to spare on economically unproductive creatures, like pets and daughters.

Anyhow, a team of housekeepers (an indeterminate number of whom live in the building as fulltime staff) descends on the building each morning to sweep the floors, wipe them down with water, dust the furniture, take out the trash, and do the laundry. In the evening, they sweep and wipe down the floors again, take the trash out again, and return the morning’s laundry. The sweeping, does, I grant you, seem a bit excessive to me and I can't help thinking that the wiping down with plain water is just a complete waste of time since, after all, Delhi's tap water isn't exactly fresh from a pure mountain spring.

One of the big differences with housekeeping in the US is that you are supposed to be there when they are cleaning & unlock your room for them—it’s no problem if you’re not, but your room doesn’t get cleaned. The cleaners do not want to risk being accused of breaking anything or kid/penguin-napping or anything of that sort.

I don't like this because I feel very uncertain of the etiquette of the whole thing. Every morning, when I’m bleary-eyed in front of the computer, eating my muesli, someone comes into the room and starts sweeping around me. Should I get out of the way or will that make her feel like she is bothering me? Also, I don't want to walk over the areas where they have just swept or swabbed, but I also don't particularly enjoy standing on the balcony until the floor is dry. I feel sheepish about the slovenly Western clothes I like to put on at home. I mean, damn it, if I can’t wear tank-tops and shorts on the street I want to at least have nice cool appendages in the privacy of my own home. But, then, here the housekeepers are, doing actual manual labor, with nary a clavicle or a knee in sight.

Also, does the laundry need doing every day? I don’t expect that! I thought about keeping my laundry hidden or something until I had built up a little stockpile. But that would be completely obvious once the housekeepers got the laundry, and they might not approve of me meddling with their system. And, sadly, my sweat glands do not allow for me to stop wearing fresh clothes each day, so I can't cut down on their work that way.

But what really touches on some neurotic phobia deep inside me, is that I just don’t like that the whole thing cuts into my sense of privacy. Twice a day, every day I have to make sure that my room and I are in a state that is fit to be seen by a stranger. The cleaner knows when I’m here and when I’m not, by what time I can be expected to have risen and showered, whether I’m reading or napping or writing on the computer when she arrives. (It’s worse than even Santa Claus!) But I suppose I am just being a crazy hermit. I mean, (a) I don't think the housekeeper finds me that interesting and (b) what harm could come of any observations she makes of my life? But I can't explain it, I just feel cornered everytime she arrives.

Obviously, I can't ask the housekeepers to stop coming, because it would be cruel to deny them of funds purely for the sake of my strange ideas about the sanctity of domestic space. But I can also report that trying to hide from the housekeepers is not a practical strategy -- I mean, sure, you can fail to answer the doorbell, put then you have to stay in your room until you are certain the cleaners are gone, and that can be very tricky to gauge. My current strategem is to scurry immediately to the balcony when the housekeepers arrive, but to take a book with me so that I don't seem as though I am trying to hurry them. If that fails to restore my equinimity, I haven't ruled out escape through the windows via rope ladder.

Report from the Yoga Mother Ship

I went to a yoga class today, which is good because I have not exercised since I hit Indian shores. Somehow, what with being so sweaty all the time, my levels of perceived exertion here are such that finding a way to workout just hasn’t seemed a priority. Plus, I’d already ruled out the gym in my neighborhood on account of cost. But, finally, to yoga class I went.

As is always the case immediately after trying to get back on the bandwagon after a long hiatus, I am SOOOOO sore. It’s not even the next day yet and I hurt all over. I may have to stop typing because my arm muscles can’t bear the strain. Now, this yoga class was not too different from what one finds in the US, no doubt because I didn’t go to an ashram for the class but rather an ex-pat-oriented place. (My Sanskrit is not so good, so I felt a bit shy about showing up to do yoga with the monks; also, I think I may have been a British imperialist in a previous life and the monks might be able to spot that. I base the suspicions about my prior incarnation on the fact that I have eaten roughly three million McVitie’s Hob-Nobs since arriving here.) But either because of the heat or my sloth of the last few weeks, this class felt tough – I mean, how many times does the sun really need saluting? At the best of times, I can only get through about four rounds of Hola-al-Sols before all my “jumping my feet back into plank pose” starts to resemble a sort of sickly hop. Also disheartening was learning that, even for an ex-pat, I sweat a lot. In fact, I was the only person who left a little sweat angel on her mat after the lie-down-and-rest pose at the end of class.

…

It is very hard for me to believe this, but I’ve been here almost a month. Among other considerations, this probably means I should write to my advisers soon with an update (shudder). I don’t feel like my time has been frittered away, exactly, but I am not sure how impressed my rather hard-core committee members are going to be with what I’ve done so far. And, ahem, it doesn’t help that the two other people from my program who are here in India this summer got loads done. (No need to name names – the person who traveled across 4 states and compiled a cool one hundred interviews with peasants regarding their land disputes knows who she is).

My big activity to date has been interviews of policy analyst types at think tanks and academic institutions. Meeting the Larry Diamonds and Wesley Clarks of India, if you will. The accomplishment from this is that I now have a list of contact names of politicians and ex-politicians who could be primary sources for me. Rather than commentators, like my original contacts. Also, I’ve had lots of invitations to talks at various centers and of desks to work at, plus I now have a letter of affiliation with Delhi University, which is key to begging my way into national libraries. (Where, no doubt, “University of Delhi” will be dutifully penned into a Bob Crachet-esque ledger, so that record of my access of state archives can enter into the world’s largest security system to rely only on ballpoint pens).

So, these interviews have had the plus that the general hospitable-ness of the Indian policy community has been confirmed. The downside is my demoralization at the kinds of responses I am hearing to my substantive questions. My questions are partially at fault, and I’ve been trying to rework those and have definitely axed some of the ones I started with. But, gosh, how to say this without being snide? I guess there really is no way: people’s answers are usually kind of, well, wrong. Like the sort of thing I'd grudgingly give a B+ to at grade-inflated Stanford.

First, people seem to have this weird tendency to think that everything that has happened obviously had to occur, and everything that didn’t happen was always a lost cause. Which is problematic since stuff keeps happening, thus moving contingencies from “impossible” to “inevitable” with distressing frequency. Second, there is this general resistance to discussing why policies occur as opposed to whether they are a good idea. If I had a rupee for every time someone explained why something happened by telling me why that something was a good idea, I’d have almost twenty-five, twenty-six cents by now.

I think one of the exchanges at a recent interview pretty much sums it up. Quick background: there is this state in India named Bihar. Think of it as the Alabama of India—definitely a backwater, poor, rural, weird propensity for natural disasters. And in 2000 part of Bihar was split off and became the state of Jharkhand. And Jharkhand is like the Birmingham of Bihar. I mean, maybe it’s not the Upper East Side, but it’s still the richest part of the state and (this is where the metaphor really works and why I had to pick on Alabama) there is an important steel industry there which is most of the state’s economic base. (Nice use of Southern economic history trivia, no?) So it is sort of weird that Bihar/Alabama let Jharkhand/Birmingham go. I asked a question about this and I was getting the usual “inevitability” story as an answer. So I pointed out to the respondent that, after all, Jharkhand/Birmingham has been asking to leave the state since 1956, and why didn’t it inevitably happen sooner? And he stopped for a second, half-shrugged and said, “That’s true, politics comes into it too.”

There you have it folks, the thesis of my dissertation. When do new states form in India? (shrug) “It’s mostly politics.” Sadly, my committee will almost certainly want something more specific than that. Detail freaks.

Condi Rice's America

I have a little update on US public diplomacy for you today.

You see, Delhi actually plays home to a branch office of the Library of Congress, charged with obtaining publications and dailies from Asian sources. And I wanted to find out if any of their acquisitions are available for perusal (the answer is no). Finding that out meant paying a visit to the Delhi America Center, the centerpiece of which is the American Library, whose mission is, broadly, “to promote a better understanding of the culture, history, institutions, values and policies of the United States.” These seem to exist at a number of embassies and consulates, actually, so that is something to bear in mind should you ever find yourself abroad without access to a Martin Van Buren biography.

Public Diplomacy: Team India can be proud—the library was very full and all the patrons were of South Asian extraction, although, of course, many of them may well have been US citizens, too. But the free internet and AC no doubt has some charms for locals.

I spent awhile perusing the shelves, wanting to get a sense of the image of America the State Dept was projecting. I was expecting something rather wholesome and folksy, lots of smarmy biographers of the Founders and what not. But somewhat to my surprise, the government’s preferred public face of America is pretty much an NPR listener: This All-American family owns a large number of books, mostly non-fiction, concentrated on history and world affairs. Their DVD collection is overwhelmingly produced by PBS and their interest in religious literature is entirely sociological. The collection contains such syllabus-friendly works as Dreier, Mollenkopf, & Swanstrom’s “Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century” and Katznelson & Milner’s “American Political Science: The Discipline’s State and the State of the Discipline,” suggesting advanced degrees or maybe even an academic career.

Literature runs toward the classics, thinning considerably after about 1950, with exceptions made for such literary luminaries as Tony Morrison and John Updike. Our All-American family apparently has no use for Patricia Cornwall or, indeed, any book that one can purchase at an airport. They own many books on the Native American experience but only a few on sports, and these include such not-exactly-the-Budweiser-crowd titles as “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup” and a biography of Arthur Ashe.

This felt a bit misleadingly high-minded but perhaps welcome as an aspirational statement. But I was very distressed by the way the lefty, intellectual portrayal of Americans stops short of presenting current events: there were basically no books on the war in Iraq. When you type “Iraq” into the catalog, in fact, you get only a few hits from the Congressional Research Service. The catalog can’t be that good, though, because their collection also includes Kenneth Pollack’s “The Threatening Storm” and a rather obscure edited volume on the merits of the invasion. But no “Fiasco” or “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” Bob Woodward’s flattering early take on Bush is represented, but not “State of Denial.” (Notice all the puns about denial of this book’s existence that I could have made there, but didn’t). To be fair, they do have Richard Clarke’s “Against all Enemies” and a rather exuberant book on Al-Jazeera’s dominance in Middle Eastern media.

When one adds this lack of engagement with current debates to the rest of the collection, I think the government’s preferred public face comes off as something of a limousine liberal. Someone who probably hasn’t read any of the books he owns. But if he liked books, they would be serious books with a vaguely generous notion of the rest of the world. After all, the nanny is from Trinidad and she's been great, hardly ever asks for a day off.

...

In lighter news, I found some St. Ives Apricot Scrub today. I actually remember the first time I ever saw this product. My older sister must have just started taking an interest in cosmetics and she showed me the Scrub she had procured and explained the importance of adequate exfoliation. I was quite impressed, assuming that St. Ives must be some kind of high-priced Swiss import, the use of which was unbearably sophisticated. In retrospect, I doubt those exfoliations did much for me, not only because I wasn’t very faithful about them but also because the scrub used to come in a tub (like Noxema) and repeatedly sticking ones hands into the face wash seems sort of unsanitary now. Anyhow, this was all before the current hegemony of bath poufs and shower gel (for my male readers: a bath pouf is a bunch of nylon netting scrunched into what is vaguely a sphere, to be used for gentle removal of dead skin—ask your girlfriend or sister is bath poufs could be right for you) and I haven’t used Apricot Scrub in awhile. But I recently noticed that what with the heat and moisture and lack of poufs here, I’ve started to molt. Which is both itchy and icky. So I’m looking forward to getting back to the good ol’ days of St. Ives—if my blog becomes unbearably classy, you’ll know why.

I miss seatbelts even more than tap water

Albert and I are in considerably better condition this week than last on a number of fronts: legally registered, financially un-pariahed, and reconnected by cell phone. With “settling in” having stretched almost to three weeks, it’s time for me to get to work. As theory begins to confront practice, however, I am feeling a wee bit daunted. Especially since, in my case, the theory was pretty much “I’ll figure it out when I get there” which means that my whole to-do list consists of the single, distressingly vague bullet point “figure it out.” Instead of talking at length about that, though, I’ll offer a little local color.

I definitely am warming to Delhi. I can have naan everyday if I want to, but there are also stores to buy peanut butter, wheat bread, and cheddar cheese. I can read extensive coverage of the Bollywood-organized crime nexus in each day’s paper and The Hindu (admittedly a Bombay publication) has a really excellent crossword. There are coffee shop chains that have infiltrated pretty much every major commercial zone in the city, so there is always someplace to go sit where it is cool and I can people watch and drink one of the creamsicle-like concoctions that I prefer to actual coffee.

The downside to Delhi is that not only are large parts of it outdoors (ridiculously shortsighted, obviously) it exists in a three dimensional space such that I have to move between different points in the city to go about my day. If someone invents a teleporter, Delhi will be awesome.

Because the traffic is outrageous even by third world standards. The informal bad habits – like the use of horns in place of turn signals or treating every traffic lane as if it were 2 or 3 or 4.5 or whatever else vehicle width permits – are combined with these mind-bogglingly dangerous planned features of the roads. For example, there are ramps on the highway that run in the exact opposite direction of the traffic, so that the driver is just supposed to get up to speed and then merge while veering across the oncoming traffic onto the proper side of the road. Less expensive than building a fly-over, yes. But bad for the blood pressure.

Then there is the condition of the roads. I traveled to the Taj Mahal two weeks ago in a rented car and, no sooner do we pull into Agra, than the driver runs into a large concrete block, which becomes wedged underneath the car and drags about two meters while on the undercarriage, making a white mark on the road like a huge piece of sidewalk chalk. Now, I don’t really understand how the driver managed to not see the hunk of cement. But I think it is also noteworthy that (a) this chunk of cement was a piece of the median that had made a bid for freedom and (b) despite the fact that several traffic officers converged on the scene to argue about something, I am fairly certain no one ever moved the cement out of the road.

Anthropology types would probably make some comment about how India’s roads are a chaotic yet organic ballet of noise and motion and, unnerving as it may be to Western sensibilities, the roads work according to their own subaltern logic of coordination matrices, or whatever. This is hogwash. India has terrible traffic statistics. When I first arrived, the government had just begun a re-inspection program on the city’s Blue Line bus system. (Some sort of sub-contractor, perhaps, since there is also a White Line bus system and seeing as how politicians have a generally antagonistic attitude toward the buses). As this was the issue of the day, the newspapers highlighting every accident involving the Blue Liners—and using such journalistically temperate phrases as “There would seem to be no end to the reign of terror” to do it. Purple-prosey as that is, I eventually started to agree since the papers were able to gleefully report on 1 to 2 new pedestrian deaths caused by Blue Liners every day.

But I reserve my real outrage for the motorcycles/scooters here. There seems to be some sort of law about drivers wearing helmets, so most do. But passengers never have them. So you’ll see this man driving along, with his wife and kids piled on a motorcycle, and he’s got the only helmet. The wife, due to notions of propriety, is riding side-saddle on the back of the motorcycle, possibly holding a baby in one arm. Another child sits between dad’s legs on the foot rest area of the scooter. And, if needs be, one kid can sit between mom and dad. And, again, only dad has a helmet. Such chivalry! Sure, your spouse and progeny are one unexpected bump away from being human jelly, but at least your wife isn’t destroying the family honor by straddling a cycle in public.

I often feel like I want to give the drivers of Delhi a firm scolding. But the fact that one does have to move around in the city means that standards start to drop quickly. I had to ride on the back of a cycle for about 5 blocks during the housing search. I almost cried I was so scared. And I think I’ve taken an auto-rickshaw ride with a driver who, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure was stoned. On the upside, Delhi has one of the nicest metro’s I’ve ever seen, although the coverage is limited. The exact same computerized voice which tells you to “Mind the Gap” in London pleasantly warns you, here in Delhi, not to touch unattended objects as “they may contain explosives. Thank you.” But I think it’s still safer than the streets.