Finding Happiness on My Autorickshaw Commute

I rushed out the door on my way to work, obscenely late, as usual. (Stop it. I can hear your snickering through the internet void.) As I emerged from the gate, an autorickshaw driver who had already taken me to work a few times waved at me wildly, encouraging me to walk past the other three such drivers who were trying to get my attention and beeline straight for his rickety wheels. I complied. He was fast, less rude than most, and seemed to take the quickest route through the least congested parts of south Delhi. I hopped in, and he looked at his watch and remarked that I was later than usual. I grunted. As if I hadn’t noticed. We sped off, weaving and honking our way through other weavers and honkers. As we approached one turn, I braced myself, gripping the railing of the rickshaw with one hand and my stuff with the other. I had learned on previous days that this road was traumatically bumpy, with potholes and craters the entire length of two city blocks. It didn’t help that most rickshaw drivers didn’t feel the need to slow down to accommodate the conditions. But today there was an excessive amount of traffic on the approach. When I realized that the clog was due to steamrollers and other construction equipment working its way down the offending block, my heart sang. I know it sounds a bit extreme, but literally — the sense that I had been in this town and traveling a certain route long enough to figure out which parts of it drove me nuts and then to see it through a positive change (in Delhi no less) raised my spirits for long enough to temporarily forget that the traffic jam meant I was going to arrive at work sometime after lunch. The recognition that roads do get better, one block at a time, in at least some parts of the city, was a bonus. And to top it all off, for the first time in four months and a result of this strange and fleeting connection I had created with Delhi public services on my way to work, I felt like I actually lived here.

Yes, All Good Things Must Come to an End…

…but this really exceeded normal speeds of demise! My tenure with an NGO I previously mentioned connecting with came to an abrupt end a week ago. But fear not, I quickly immersed myself into a new project.

Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP) facilitates gender sensitive-training, research and praxis in the areas of Conflict Transformation, Security and Peacebulding in South Asia. It was established in 1999 as part of the efforts of the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness The Dalai Lama to build a culture of coexistence and nonviolence. Over the next several weeks, I will be assisting the team of women at WISCOMP in hosting an international symposium on Dialogue Processes here in New Delhi. But before I get all poetic and curse this new project, I’ll stop writing while I’m still ahead and enjoying my new job. (I guess living in India for a few months has made me superstitious!)

Storytelling for Change

The cycle and vast scope of poverty in India are daunting challenges and uncomfortable subjects. Visitors, including myself, struggle to find an appropriate box in our minds in which to categorize the realities we witness on the ground. We read that nearly 80 percent of Indians, or 836 million people, live on less than 50 cents a day (equivalent to about 2 dollars a day in terms of cost of living) — and this from an Indian government report. We cringe, and move to the next headline. We look out the window of our passing car at the street children selling magazines and trinkets and returning to the road divider every few minutes to check on their baby siblings, we see the elderly suffering from leprosy moving from car to car, person to person, rattling a can, and as we make eye contact, we quickly shift our gaze. We feel guilt, sadness, sympathy, frustration, disgust, anger, and more, and we feel helpless. We often maintain stoic faces when faced with someone begging, or we attempt to make a small difference in their day by emptying our pockets of change. Few of us feel empowered to do much more. Last week, I encountered and joined a group that is doing much, much more.

Katha is a local NGO that works to alleviate poverty through an unusual medium: storytelling. Working broadly in the areas of language, culture and translation, Katha-ites are “publishers, teachers, and agents of change” who use stories to increase the accessibility of education to the under-privileged. Katha’s publishing house is based in South Delhi, and is well-known amongst enthusiastic readers for its collection of children’s books, most of which are available in both English and in Hindi (and all of which are beautifully illustrated), as well as for its novels. The concept of engaging new readers and students, regardless of their age, through folkloric stories and cultural familiarity is, in my opinion, brilliant.

Katha’s educational arm has currently enrolled over 6000 children in more than 50 schools and learning centers across India, the majority of which are in and around Delhi. Demonstrating an understanding of that complicated cycle of poverty I referred to earlier, the organization has made some small adjustments to their scope to accommodate a target community. For example, Katha centers have preschools and daycare centers for little ones so that older boys and girls can go to school instead of caring for their baby siblings; some of their schools have adult training and vocational courses with schedules that are more convenient to daily wage earners; and Katha has recently launched an adult English Academy, recognizing that a basic mastery of English will improve economic opportunities for the local residents.

Last week I visited Kathashala, one of Katha’s learning centers in the Govindpuri slum in East Delhi. The sense of excitement to learn and teach, to impart knowledge and effect change permeates every corner of the small brick complex. From the guard at the gate to the carpentry instructor, the class full of 8 year olds who jump up from the floor to recite “Good morning Ma’am!” the minute we walk in the door to the Director who shares her passion for the Katha way of teaching with every listening ear, I could feel the energy and enthusiasm.

If you can’t already tell, I’m looking forward to contributing whatever I can to Katha’s mission in the next few months. In other words, you’ll be hearing more about my adventures with Katha in the days to come!

Happy Lohri and Pongal!

This past Sunday was Lohri, largely celebrated in Punjab and other parts of North India. Also, as I recently learned (thanks CB!), yesterday was Pongal, celebrated in Tamil Nadu and other parts of South India. Essentially similar events, Lohri and Pongal are like North American Thanksgiving with (in the case of the former) a little bit of Groundhog Day thrown in. I’ll spare you the history and cultural lesson (please check out the links to Wikipedia if you’re curious), but the holidays are an annual celebration of the upcoming harvest and a party to end the rest period before the gathering of crops. (No, K and I won’t be gathering crops this season, but maybe next year.) The Groundhog Day bit comes from the belief that Lohri marks the end of winter.

As K was frantically packing and preparing to head back to Canada on the night of Lohri (and since we didn’t have any clue as to how Lohri is celebrated), we didn’t anticipate partaking in the festivities. But our downstairs neighbors were getting ready for the customary bonfire and invited us to join them. Never known to shy away from a party, K and I readily obliged. Once our hosts lit the bonfire in the driveway, we all toasted to Lohri, walked around the fire, sang a few songs (or mumbled and smiled, in our case), and each threw a handful of popcorn, peanuts, and revri (a crunchy, sesame seed-encrusted sweet) into the fire. Presumably since the idea of burning things while celebrating outdoors was reminiscent of Diwali, our neighbors pulled out some firecrackers leftover from November. We proceeded to entertain ourselves with this additional form of a fire hazard for another 15 minutes or so before downing our drinks and excusing ourselves for dinner. Aside from visits by two groups of hijras, the second of which left happily with a wad of cash, the celebration was pretty mellow, and hey, who doesn’t love to play with fire every once in a while?

Crowd Non-Control

The story “Two NRI Women Mobbed/Molested by 70 Men Outside J.W. Marriott in Mumbai on New Year’s Eve,” or some variation of this headline, hit the Indian national news on New Year’s Day. In short: two women and their husbands emerged from the Marriott around 1:45am and headed towards Juhu Beach. Shortly thereafter, they were assaulted by a group of men, which quickly grew to a number of anywhere between 40 and 80 individuals (depending on which Indian tabloid you’re reading). The young women were grabbed, groped, and pinched, their clothes were ripped, and their husbands were overwhelmed by the crowd. They were all pushed to the ground under a hoard of aggressive men. Photographers from the media who happened to be present captured the incident, and eventually (after about 10 to 15 minutes of the onslaught) grabbed the attention of police officers passing by in a vehicle, who apparently rescued the women and took them to a local police station. No one was arrested at the time, and no incident report was filed until a couple of days later. The police commissioner’s response to the incident basically stated that the event had been blown out of proportion, that law enforcement cannot be expected to prevent such incidents everywhere always, and that “these things happen all the time.”

Several components of this incident have drawn attention: the women were NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) living in the United States, visiting India for the wedding of one of the couples; they had emerged from a five-star hotel in one of the most posh areas of the city; the reaction of the local police was to delay, deflect, and wait for public outcry before taking any action; contrary to popular opinion, women’s safety in Mumbai isn’t necessarily any better than anywhere else in this country; and these women were attacked by a group that grew to at least 40 men, if not double that.

It’s this last bit that boggles my mind. So a couple of guys, or maybe a group of guys, maybe they’re drunk, maybe they’re charged up on New Year’s levels of testosterone, are hanging around on the street with nothing left to do bars are closed, shows are over, they’re not ready to go home, don’t know what to do with themselves… and in some shift that I find entirely incomprehensible, they end up traumatically molesting a couple of women. But it’s not just a few guys or a group of them. It becomes a mob. The other dudes hanging around further down the beach, or on the steps of the hotel, decide NOT to break it up or pull the offenders off the women, but to jump in. How do 40/80 guys attack two women, anyway? At some point, aren’t they just pushing and shoving and jumping all over one another? The situation begs a question regarding what’s going on in the collective mind (or lack thereof) of the group, and what, if anything, can be done to minimize or control the behavior leading to such incidents.

The subjects of such herd behavior and crowd psychology have long intrigued me. What is it that causes groups of people to behave is such drastic ways? Why do their actions vary so dramatically from acceptable societal norms? (This is assuming, of course, that not each and every one of the men in the above example believe in, support, and individually purport to threaten and accost women, or that they find such actions to be socially acceptable — big assumption.)

Many theorists have attempted to tackle this question; Freud claimed that the minds within a group merge to form a unique way of thinking — the “enthusiasm” of each member within the group is heightened, and as a result, the individual becomes less aware of the nature of his own actions. Another theorist, Gustave Le Bon argued that crowds foster anonymity, generate emotion, and that at a simplistic level, they act irrationally. A slightly different theory of convergence claims that crowd behavior is not a product of the crowd itself, but of certain individuals within the crowd. Finally, the emergent-norm theory cuts somewhere in the middle: social behavior in a crowd isn’t necessarily entirely predictable, nor is it entirely irrational. When crowds of like-minded individuals come together, a new pattern of their collective action emerges.

As I am sitting here at our adopted dining table — it’s now around 11pm — I hear some shouts at the market across the street. The neighborhood is usually pretty quiet, seeming almost suburban at this time of the night. I step out onto the balcony. Through the trees lining the property, I see legs scuffling, more shouts. One guy takes off running down the street, and another starts yelling after him, “Pakro! Pakro usko!” (“Catch! Catch him!”) More scuffling in the parking lot of the market, a few minutes go by, someone jumps in an auto-rickshaw and takes off in the direction of the absconder. There are about 7 or 8 guys still arguing, yelling, pushing, stepping away from this mini-scene, and then making their way back to the middle of it. One old-ish guy looks like he’s in the middle of it. Someone picks up a boulder, wields it, resulting in renewed shouts … K had come out to join me. We get sort of shifty. Should we call the police? What should we do? What can we do? Um. Chances of me going down there to try to save someone at this moment, in the middle of writing this particular posting: slim to none. Call 100, I tell K. It’s the emergency number. The guard downstairs has approached the gate to our building and is peering out at the scene. Other guards from the neighborhood are literally lazily sauntering over in the direction of the fiasco. The one old-ish guy gets pushed to the ground. He moves to get up, and is pushed down again. A group gathers around him, pushing, kicking. K, alarmed, heads downstairs. RB, our cook, has come out as well. The old-ish guy looks unconscious. The crowd breaks up. “Daroo piya hai…” someone mumbles. (“He’s been drinking.”) Someone else wanders back over. “Isko utao.” (“Pick him up.”) From inside our gate, K inquires about calling the police. RB, half chuckling, giving the impression that this sort of thing happens all the time, and responds that if we call the police, it’ll be such a hassle. They’ll come over, ask a bunch of questions, they’ll want to file a report, and we’ll be up all night explaining what happened, what we saw… Whatever. He shakes his head and heads back to bed. Slightly uncomfortable, K and I head back up as well. My curiosity has taken off. Were they all drunk? Are they buddies? What started the scuffle? Just drunken idiocy? What happened to the guy who ran off, chased by the man in the auto? Are they all just going to get together tomorrow night and laugh about it? Or is someone going to be knocked in the head by a boulder later tonight as he heads down a dark alley towards home?

There’s more going on here than just crowds and alcohol. There seems to be something simmering under everyone’s surface. Rage, restlessness, frustration, discontent, fear? I’m not sure I’ll ever put my finger on it, and maybe it’s none or all or some combination or so variable that this is a silly effort. But tonight, to me, it’s a stark reminder to not take my or anyone else’s personal safety and security for granted, and that groups of men around here, angry, drunk or neither, are a force I won’t reckon with under any circumstances.

Naya Saal Mubarak (or Happy New Year)!

A (Belated) Happy New Year and Best Wishes for 2008 from New Delhi!

Since we were wandering around the oldest synagogue in the Commonwealth on Christmas, floating on a houseboat in the backwaters of Kerala on the day of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, and lounging at a resort near Kovalam (which is only accessible by dinghy) on New Year’s Eve, I sadly can’t report much about the holiday festivities and the reaction to tragic events from India. We couldn’t have been further from the thick of things or more clueless.

More on the Kerala excursion to follow, but in the meantime, I am hereby (and somehow when you post it, the statement becomes so much more emphatic) bidding farewell to a jam-packed 2007, and wishing you all a fantastically fun-filled 2008. (Forgive me, I love cheesy alliteration.)

Musings

I’ve been collecting a stockpile of uniquely Indian oddities in the “Huh?” compartment of my brain to share with you. Rather than let another day pass (since many days have already escaped me), I’ll just present them here as succinctly as I can:

1. Scene from stuck in traffic (there will likely be more of these): A fence divides traffic traveling in two directions along a stretch of road near Lajpat Nagar. A group of young boys, say around 12 years old, clad in shorts and not much more, are painting the fence green. But something seems off in the painting process. A closer look reveals that the boys don’t have paintbrushes. Each boy leans over, dips his entire hand in the bucket of paint, and attempts to slosh it all over the bars of the fence. I guess somewhere between the local government project, the contractor, the painters, and the boys who somehow came into the picture, the brushes were “misplaced.” In this country, “child labor” is a term used by the international media and NGOs, and pretty much no one else.

2. Warding Off the Evil Eye:

These ornament looking things hang all over the place — on the back of a car, rickshaw, or truck, in some corner of an office or home, or in this case, on the railing at the entrance to a hair salon. Apparently the string of green chilies and lemons wards off the evil eye, protecting a place, thing, its contents, or its patrons from the evil eye. That’s all I know.

3. A random thought from KA: “Some people love the Indian lifestyle because if you have money, you don’t have to ever lift a finger.” The servant will serve you tea, breakfast, and whatever else you may fancy in the morning, either that same servant or some other servant will have washed, ironed, and folded your clothes, ensured that the geyser is on so that you have a constant stream of piping how water for your shower, and confirmed that your chosen selection of daily papers is in your hand every morning. The driver will come in and carry your briefcase to the car, battle the mayhem of city streets to get you to work in one piece, and park and take care of the car in your absence. When you walk into the office, more people carry your stuff, serve you edibles and drinkables, present you with pertinent information, solve any technical problems your phone, computer, or even home television may have, make arrangements for your lunch… and so it goes. For people like KA and I, each step of this process is laden with varying degrees of discomfort. How could I possibly pass my dirty clothes along to someone twice my age and not think twice about what it takes for him to return them to me, clean? Why am I not clearing my own dishes? Or running to the fridge to grab some hot sauce during dinner? If I don’t carry my own bags, my arm muscles will degenerate and fall off!!! OK… time to move on.

4. Water Isn’t a Drink. When you walk into someone’s house, you’re immediately offered something to drink.

RD: Um, no thanks. I’m fine.

Host: You must have something!

RD: OK, just a glass of water would be great.

Host: Well you’ll obviously get water! What else? Tea, coffee, soda, juice, beer?
RD: Really, nothing. I just had some tea a little while ago.

Host: [Calls out to someone in the kitchen to bring water]

The next part is even more awkward. A servant brings a glass of water on a tray. I pick it up, thank them, and take a sip. He or she doesn’t move. I look up and start a conversation with my host. The person is still standing there. Until I’ve finished my fill of water and put the glass back on the tray, the servant usually won’t leave. Water is apparently not a drink. It’s a refresher, to be presented to anyone the moment they walk in the door, but it doesn’t count as “having something” when you come over.

Indian Polo Championship 2007

Talk about feeling out-of-one’s-element. First of all, my knowledge of polo was limited to the simple facts that the sport is hazardous, and that it involves an elite crowd, horses, sticks, and something akin to a puck or ball that is meant to be knocked into a goal. Second, prior to attending the Indian Polo Championship a couple of weeks ago, I would never have believed that the noise level anywhere in this country actually fell low enough to hear oneself think. But I left the awe-inspiring event with a few lessons learned: peace and quiet in Delhi can be found on the racetrack during a match; horses are marvelous animals; and Dattas are descendants of the Mohyals, who were cavalrymen, suggesting to some that I should make a fine polo player. Maybe in my next life. Finally — Sikhs wearing kilts. Need I say more? Oh, and in case you were wondering, Royal Johor beat Kingfisher First 9-8.

On Giving Thanks

I felt pretty jittery and unsettled during Thanksgiving week here, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why. I had crowded the fact that it was the third week of November out of my brain, but that wasn’t so hard to do in this lifestyle; I spend quiet moments fretting over whether water will come out of the faucet when I turn it on, how I’m going to get from place A to place B without getting ripped off (meaning that I’m not sure if my accent will reveal that Hindi isn’t my first language), and whether I’ll find meaningful work here, to give a few examples. But I’ve already digressed.

Thanksgiving week was rough because this was the first Thanksgiving I have ever spent away from my family, the first year I wasn’t celebrating the occasion in my mom’s kitchen. It didn’t help that I was getting daily reports from her about the preparations — the event would be at its smallest this year with a mere 22 people in attendance; she had been wooed away from the mashed potatoes out of a box by my very insistent brother and sister-in-law; she was trying out some new fancy Williams Sonoma recipes that I had forwarded her (never expecting that she’d actually take them up); the turkey was being injected in surgical fashion with some complex masala mixture — you get the idea. It was mouth-watering, soul-wrenching torture.

I endured. I even got onto Skype with the whole lot of them that night, as they lazily led their satisfied, over-extended bellies into the study to chat with me for a moment before returning to their wine and pumpkin pies.

Two nights later, my father flew into Delhi, and three days later, a few of my close relatives here gathered for a small get-together. Unlike the usual Delhi buffet style setup, the dinner table was set for all attendees. I didn’t catch on. As I was walking in, my uncle was asking my aunt who was going to do the cutting, and where. Crap, I thought. It’s someone’s birthday, and I’m clueless as to who the cake is for. Yeah, I still didn’t catch on. It wasn’t until Papa, assuming that I was smart enough to have figured out that he had imported Thanksgiving dinner for me, announced that the turkey he had brought along weighed a solid 14.5 lbs that my jaw dropped.

There it was all being laid out before my widening eyeballs: sweet potato pudding, mashed potatoes (real ones, not out of a box), stuffing (with sausage), brussels sprouts with pancetta, a loaf of melt-in-your-mouth pumpkin bread, cranberry sauce, gravy, and a whole 14.5 lb, juicy, masala-injected turkey. And enough leftovers to last us until my sister arrives. (That’s right, I have pretty high expectations for the contents of her luggage now, as well!)

I couldn’t even wait until everyone had served themselves. But before I dug in, I squeezed my eyes shut. Most parents might lament about how bummed I was to miss Thanksgiving this year, some might even joke about FedExing me some leftovers, but only my parents would cook a full parallel meal, pack it in layers of Ziploc, freeze it, stuff it into the suitcase, transport it clear across the planet, and arrange for a Thanksgiving dinner in Delhi, all because their daughter was moping about the lack of availability of pumpkin pie in India.

I give thanks for my wonderfully insane parents.

The Inevitable Delhi Belly

I had to catch it at some point, the inevitable Delhi Belly. You’ve probably at least heard of it, if not experienced it yourself. I’ll spare you the details, since they’re not pretty, but my weak stomach knocked me out for the entire day, just as long as I needed to break the several-day-long hiatus I had taken from the blog. The unfortunate part is that my Delhi Belly came along with a Classic Hangover — the terrible puckered parched pounding kind — and the realization that I had drunk dialed my parents, of all people, upon returning from the wedding Sangeet that put me in both conditions of poor health. Now, on to more interesting subjects than the state of my stomach:

K and I weren’t the only ones with a wedding to attend here last night. The city is nuts with wedding fever. Apparently, there were over 10,000 weddings in Delhi yesterday.

Wednesday was seen as one of the best days to tie the knot. “The Gods wake up from their four months’ sleep. The whole day is auspicious,” Daya Shankar Prasad, a Hindu priest, told the Times of India, referring to the first wedding season day.

It took us one hour to travel about 4 kms, even though our taxi driver rode the shoulder the whole way alongside the white horses being directed from one barat to the next in all their finery. I assume we can look forward to the same kind of traffic every night for the next few weeks while the gods are awake from their slumber and the auspicious wedding period continues.