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.