There goes the neighborhood. Or not.

I’m moving out of New Delhi this Saturday. And though I switched rooms once, I’ve been in the same building since I arrived here last July. So this is my last opportunity to show you pictures of the abandoned car that has been sitting on my block since I arrived.

I really regret not taking a photo of it when I arrived, so I could give you some sense of the rate of decay. But last July this tan Ford Falcon was clearly abandoned, old, and beaten up, but it was largely intact. Since then, the glass has been broken, some of the seats have been torn up, and paint was dumped on the car at some point. The car has also been used as a trash can, including one person who got rid of a small oil lamp – of the kind used for festivals and temple – by sticking it in the back window. Odd. But, and this amazes me, the car hasn’t yet been hauled away or completely stripped for scrap metal. Part of the engine block is definitely still in the hood, so you’d think there’d be something there a junkyard would buy.

This car is a good illustration of what I think it means to live in a “fancy” neighborhood in New Delhi. Because, on the one hand, no one in the neighborhood is sufficiently strapped for cash to haul the car away for scrap. And/or the private security guards at the adjoining houses scare-off any attempts to blatantly appropriate the car. But, on the other hand, there is no “not-in-my-backyard” outrage at having this mini-junk yard midst these very expensive homes. There are block associations in Defence Colony, but they don’t seem to have made this car a priority.

I’m definitely going to try to come back to Defence Colony one more time before I leave, so that I can see if anything new has happened to the car. But I don’t have any idea what would finally spur someone to take charge of getting rid of the car.

About 10 minutes on Wikipedia has led me to conclude that Ford Falcons do not biodegrade. So, I guess this patch of Delhi’s sidewalk is scheduled to for clearing circa 7.5 years from now when it will be incinerated along with the rest of the planet due to the expansion of the sun. Unfortunately, on balance, I think that’s going to be tough on neighborhood property values.

Killing Time. And Windows.

Prior to these latest, nearly decisive, primaries, Barack Obama was pointing out that, in the time he’s been running for president, babies have learned to walk and talk. HA! What I wouldn’t give for a job-qualification process that short!

In the time since I started graduate school at Stanford, my niece was gestated, born, learned to walk, talk, and identify the principals from both Winnie the Pooh and Dora the Explorer. And now she is two years old and expecting the arrival of her sibling on May 31. And that baby will probably be walking and talking before I’ve actually finished writing my PhD. In fact, by the time this India project finally becomes a book, my little niece will probably be horrifying her parents by asking for precociously-sexual “tween” apparel and her own cell phone.

Which is to say: this has been a week of waiting—not without some interviews or fairly firm promises of the same, but lots of down time, nonetheless. I’m a little restless and concerned that May has turned out to be a low value-added month in the field. But, hey, minus the waiting and the dead ends and the interviewing of the entirely wrong person, what would I have done for a whole year in India, anyhow?

It’s also been a week of maintenance. Just as soon as I start writing about having perhaps underestimated the competence of the Indian service sector, events conspired to change my mind back. Our internet connection was canceled thanks to an Airtel mistake, and then reconnected only after five days and a heartbreaking series of phone calls, hours wasted on hold, totally pointless home visits, and general misdirection. A highlight: a visit from a technician to confirm that our connection had, in fact, been switched off. Because, obviously, if I were receiving internet access without an account and, thus, not paying for it, the first thing I would do is call and fraudulently complain about not having service. I also like to buy the unlimited-refill soda at fast food restaurants and then drink only one glass of Coke, just to game the system. But I’ve always been pretty edgy.

Also in the “are you !@#$-ing kidding me?” category of high quality workmanship is my landlord’s house. Because two days ago I put my hand through the glass in my extremely poorly made window. (I only got a little scratch, no problem.) The window, which opens outward, was sticking against the sill and so I was banging against the frame to get it open. And the heel of my palm rapped the glass. Which mustered all the resistance of a crème brulee. Actually, I think the reason that I didn’t cut myself is that I didn’t put my hand through the window at all. I gave it a smart tap. And the glass could apparently only repel force = f <>

This is definitely not a case of not knowing my own strength. (I am totally up to date on my “not much” status in that respect). Because two of Merideth’s windows broke the same night when they were banged shut by the wind. Terrible.

I like him even more than Christian Soriano

The ultimate aim of this fieldwork is to provide the raw material for the presentation that will, hopefully, win me a job in a few years. I’ve decided to define that mandate broadly, so I can pick up some custom made business attire. To look snazzy when giving my job talks, you know?

I started thinking in the fall that I should buy a suit over Christmas break and then bring it back to India and have it copied. I mentioned this plan to a history graduate student here, and she had heartily endorsed buying an article of clothing in the US so that I could get exactly the same thing made in India. She, apparently, had no luck trying to take pictures and measurements to a tailor. Now, because she is a historian, full of advanced language skills and nuanced local knowledge, I took very seriously her account of what it was like to go to an Indian tailor. And I was very determined to find a suit that could be copied without any flexibility on the part of the Indian tailor; I even made sure my suit was all wool so that the fit would not depend on synthetic fabrics he might not have available.

In retrospect, the social scientist in me is ashamed to have been overawed by the humanities. (Extrapolating from an n of 1 – what would my committee say?!?) Because when I went to the fabric store/tailoring establishment (Delhi Cloth House & Garg Brothers Tailoring, in Khan Market, as recommended by Lonely Planet) they were just so entirely not overawed by the task I was requesting. The suit came out perfectly, probably to the point of constituting some kind of intellectual properties violation. Frankly, I am downgrading my opinion of the quality of the workmanship on Project Runway – and did I mention they use foot pedal style machines at this place?

When I showed them a dress shirt, the first thing the fabric seller says, without even touching the shirt, is that it looks like it has Lycra in it. And directed the fabric-bolt-fetching-assistants (that seems to be their main job) to fetch some poly/cotton blends. And here I was thinking I might not be able to get anything other than pure wool in Delhi – I guess it’s good that I at least knew they wouldn’t be raising the sheep out back.

Actually, Mr. Garg, the tailor, has been very patient with my naiveté regarding Delhi garment making. After I picked my suit up, we returned to the tailors and Merideth ordered a suit jacket and skirt – mind you, Merideth aren’t the same size and we have no pattern for a skirt, so this is a complete abandonment of the idea that one could only get exact replicas of existing clothes. While having lunch in the restaurant around the corner, we started to wonder if she should have asked for the skirt to be lined. You know, because women here don’t really wear skirts, so maybe the tailor wouldn’t realize that’s a part of Western business attire. And I convinced her to go back and ask. The tailor, with the munificence that is so becoming of the truly gifted, patiently said “Yes, of course, a skirt won’t work unless it’s lined.”

My experience at the tailor has prompted two things. First, extensive daydreaming about further clothes it would be fun to have made while I’m here. And, second, a bit of soul searching on the lines of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Being able to make something as well as these guys is impressive no matter where you are from. But I also think that over the course of the time I’ve spent here, I’ve drifted into assuming that many people in this city aren’t very good at their jobs, and kind of bracing myself for hassle and disappointment before any business interaction.

Of course, many of the holdups in navigating India involve differences of opinion about what doing a good job constitutes. For example, I would prefer to arrive at my destination in one piece, but the rickshaw walla would prefer to arrive there fast. So, I can’t fairly claim that he isn’t talented at driving his rickshaw even though I didn’t enjoy the ride.

Still, it seems like at most jobs—apart from the small businesses where the proprietor is always on site—hiring and incentives just aren’t particularly related to qualifications or even to effort. And who would bother to learn a job well under those conditions? To put it another way: there is a car dealership in Delhi which is named Competent. They sell a lot of cars, and so I think that name must resonate.

On a related note, I’ve become a bit slow with writing on this blog because I’ve had trouble coming up with topics. I hesitate to keep posting on the theme of the sublimely ridiculous or very weird aspects of India – I don’t want to be a hater. So this post is my salute to the small businesses of India, and my tailor in particular. They're kind of a big deal.

Answer in the Form of a Question

I have three interviews tomorrow and I'm having trouble getting motivated to write my scripts for them. Because I really haven't come up with the script that makes my respondents, well, respond. At least to the questions I am asking. So, I present a Jeopardy like exercise -- what must I be asking to be getting these answers?

The Interview Script for the Answers my Respondents Give

Please share with me your views of Pakistan.

Could you explain in 300 words or more why the United States’ ongoing support occupation of Iraq renders my question irrelevant?

What would Gandhi want for your group?

Please tell me the history of the present controversy beginning in 1650 and do not spare the excruciating, dubiously historically accurate detail. And be sure to fade into unhelpful generalities as soon as your narrative approaches 1947.

Globalization is a US imperial scourge that has caused all India’s present difficulties. Please discuss.

What are the views of “the people”? Do “the people” want development, self-governance and dignity, or do they prefer corruption, squalor and repression? What evidence do you have for these preferences?

Is your situation in anyway analogous to that of the Palestinians? Why or why not?

I would like to discuss an apparently less-than-ideal moment in India’s recent history. Please clarify for me the uniquely profound insights of Indian statecraft that explain why the Indian government has always done the exact right thing at every juncture since its inception, including the instance I have just mentioned.

Is there a lot of corruption in India? And how have you, an honest man among thieves, been personally thwarted and held back by the wickedness of others?

Why don’t you explain to me how in India you have a bicameral legislature? Since, obviously, I could not possibly have bothered to find that out before our interview.

In what ways is the present crisis entirely the fault of the British?

I look down on Indians. Please offer me a rambling and extremely pessimistic account of your country’s cultural and economic prospects so we can bond over our shared disdain.

I look down on Indians. Why don’t you rebut my skepticism regarding your country’s cultural and economic prospects in a rambling and wildly optimistic explanation of how India will soon eclipse the Britain, China and the United States militarily, economically, spiritually, and culturally?

Could you just tie this all back to Pakistan for me?

Milkshake

I suppose it is just typical of being an ex-pat that I vacillate between feeling impatient with India and wanting to stick up for it around other foreigners. No one is allowed to complain about this place but me!

Last week I overheard someone complain to a waiter about the lack of ice cream in her milkshake. One of India’s culinary quirks is that, unless you request otherwise, a milkshake doesn’t have ice cream in it. (I think the default shake is made from a sort of malt-powder and heavy cream. And, in further random speculations, perhaps this is because of the relatively patchy quality of refrigeration or because India’s “pure-veg” dieters, like the Jainists, don’t usually eat ice cream, since it contains gelatin. Which is made from horse hooves, in case you didn’t know.) In particular there was a lady at the Hilton who declared that ice cream is part of “what a milk shake is.” Not so fast lady! Granted, some things are not culturally relative (speed of light, core human rights, swooningly delicious qualities of tandoori naan) but surely every people has the right to define the milkshake for themselves? Why not just ask the waiter for ice cream instead of loudly dressing him down? Why get all high-and-mighty as though you have unique knowledge of the urtext properties of dairy-based desserts?

Exhibit 2: this column by Hendrik Hertzberg (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2008/04/hello-kali.html) where he gripes that Indian English isn’t that good despite most of the languages being Indo-European. (A misstatement which 30 seconds on Wikipedia could have corrected.) I hope Mr. Hertzberg knows 2 or more alphabets if he is going to be gripping about Indian English. And he posts this music video in Tamil where someone has added “English” subtitles – though, to both his credit and his shame, he wasn’t able to figure out that the singing wasn’t in English at all. Some of the homophonic subtitles are pretty raunchy, so the net effect is “your weird language sounds like a bunch of bad porn dialogue.”

But, speaking of pornographic images: for the last week of March I was in Orissa, home to several hundred Hindu temples. The World Heritage temple (“the sun temple”) is a good one to go see because at one point it was heavily damaged in a typhoon. As a result, the gods were removed and the temple isn’t in use as a pace of worship. I really don’t feel so great about going to a temple while other people are trying to actually be religious there—I feel I probably detract from the mystical ambience, what with my sweaty, dirty camping-gear-esque clothes and large camera.

The sun temple is also, as is reasonably common, covered in statues of people gettin’ it on. The standard “don’t be such an up-tight Westerner” explanation for this is that Hinduism embraces all aspects of life instead of being all prudish about sex and that this is a sun temple=creation =scenes of procreation. Which does raise the question of why there aren’t any other procreation-related aspects of life depicted—like agriculture or, indeed, children. There is another theory that the pictures were a sort of instruction manual for the all-male brood of Brahmins being raised at the temple. I’m not totally sure about that, since much of what the, shall we say, unusually proportioned stone statues are doing is not strictly realistic.

Doctrinal issues aside, the interaction of the racy temple architecture and the more-than-middle-aged local tour guide was highly reminiscent of health class, where you just don’t know quite what facial expression you should be adopting. The oddest moment being when the guide explained that many people come to the temple from all over Europe and they tell him that this next statue is “69. Very important position there. Very important.” I challenge you to think of an appropriate response to that remark.

Things I am learning working in Delhi's libraries

Indian innovation with the decimal point continues. You may have been told, at some point, that the decimal system, with its use of zeros as place holders, was developed here on the Subcontinent. What you may not know is that exciting innovations in number-punctuation-hybridization continue in India’s system of university libraries. Where each institution – and sometimes each collection – is busy developing an entirely unique ordinal system. These innovations are possible thanks to a willingness to use multiple decimal points, high variability in the length of alphabetical and numerical strings between punctuation marks, special capitalization systems, semi-colons, and even quotation marks. Allowing endless organizational variety, with each library’s ordering system as unique as a snowflake. The most advanced systems seem to be based on fractal mathematics, containing as they do a persuasive suggestion of repetition and regularity while, in actuality, not corresponding to any pattern discernable through the use of primitive Euclidean mathematical tools.

My high school library was kind of a joke. I find the contents of the University of Delhi’s library, in particular, rather discouraging. Because they seem to be pretty short on the kind of sources that contain the sort of raw, complete information that is the straw for research brick making. Instead, the library is long on the kind of sources that give predigested and massively abridged summaries of various concepts. So, for example, the library only has a scattering of the annual reports of most government offices, but they have whole bunches of encyclopedias and Ready Reference guides.

What this all really took me back to is the days of writing research papers in grade school and high school – when research really meant looking up what somebody else already came up with. (Real research, of course, is writing what somebody else already came up with; realizing this only after-the-fact; and then inventing a reason why what you’ve done is, despite appearances, totally new). And it just sort of reminded me of all the things I thought were terribly intellectual when I was growing up – like Star Trek (watched by nerds = smart people = people who would know great art). Ah, youth!

Sometimes the best place to study Indian linguistic minorities is Dixie. Ironically, you know who has a complete run of the government report I was trying to find at University of Delhi? Johns Hopkins. That makes me feel very foolish.

Dust is dirt. In movies about searching out the secret to Jesus’s progeny or the Temple of the Crescent Moon, dusty libraries always have a powdery sort of look. A character pulls out an obscure book and blow on it, sending forth a grayish cloud of accumulated matter.

This is NOT how really dusty books actually work, at least not here. This dust is not some talcum powdering of antiquarian charm. This is grime. Blowing on this dust dislodges nothing. Though one’s hands and clothing (and backpack and school supplies and lunch) do become dirty when put in contact with such a book, the total quantity of muck on the book is only imperceptibly altered and much of the text remains obscured by brown film.

The great unsung heroes of the history of human knowledge are the indexers. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone ever found anything before electronic search. But what few scraps of information were retrieved in those dark times was thanks to the superhuman tolerance for boredom and/or crippling struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder of the press clippers, the book review filers, the bibliography annotators, and the reference editors of yesteryear.

Kathmandu and back again

Last weekend I was in Nepal with my parents, sharing the last three days of their package tour through India. I was really looking forward to a couple days of five star living, and to seeing the mountains. Ironically, however, I caught a terrible bug from being in a hotel with so many darn foreigners. So for the better part of this last week I was in bed with the flu, wondering why I ever abandoned my sub-tropical, filth-infested home for the bracing mountain air.

One thing I have learned: it is impossible to overstress the importance of travel companions with a similar metabolic rate. That is, the tour group we joined up with was mostly empty nesters and, as a consequence, they have reach that stage where you totally transcend base physical needs, food in particular. So the tour included breakfast at the hotel but then no rations for the next 8 hours! Despite my best efforts to get a muesli binge in early, I was starting to get a little peckish by our second Hindu temple and was practically fainting away by the time we were given free time to wander through an authentic Nepali traditional tourist emporium.

From what I could see through the haze of near starvation, Nepal has plenty of interesting architecture and is generally more approachable than India. All of the temples were very busy, which is not the case in Delhi. We saw several little boys on the way to get their sacred thread tied on—which is sort of like first communion for upper caste Hindus, except with a parade. The parade includes people carrying all the things that will be offered to the gods on your behalf, culminating in the sacrifice of an animal. Which I was very anxious not to have to witness.

Also, there has been a shortage of petrol and kerosene for about seven months now in Nepal. Apparently, this was because the Indian government started refusing to let tankers travel through its territory en route to Nepal because Kathmandu owes the Indians money for petroleum shipping. The finances seem to have been sorted out, so oil was supposed to be on its way. But a city between the India/Nepal border and Kathmandu had hijacked two tankers in the preceding days to force them to deliver oil to their community rather than driving it all the way to the capital. So now no more truckers were going to come into Nepal without a security escort.

The visible consequence of this was huge lines of cars and motorcycles for blocks & blocks. The vehicles were left in line to hold a spot for however many days or weeks necessary. Similarly plastic kerosene containers were lined up on the sidewalk, hundreds in a row. Ropes were run through the handles of twenty or so jugs, to discourage scrambling of the order. Also, my sister and I saw some kids burning tires while taking a taxis. They weren’t being very hardcore about it, but that is still a personal first for me – seeing tires being burned in protest of something, I mean.

The Himalayas are amazing. While I might in years past have felt very unhardcore & tacky flying in a little plane to get a view of the mountain peaks, I was spared these thoughts by the many recent books on the Everest climbing industry (eg). There were a bunch of trekkers on their way to Base Camp actually. Yuppie scum - seriously, why even bother climbing a mountain if you are going to have Sherpas and oxygen. (I am starting to feel a bit defensive about how long its been since I've done any cardio.)

The temple square in Kathmandu.

A shrine in use as a vegetable stand.