“You’ve Been Mostly Dead All Day.”

Or in my case, all summer. But with a little help from Miracle Max and a dose of inspiration, we’re coming back to life.

Got me.

I came across this on *Pardon My Hindi tonight and couldn’t resist the opportunity to share it.

We’re off to Yosemite tomorrow for a night amongst waterfalls, breathtaking beauty, and bears. Look for more on that soon. And fear not: I am still processing and channeling India. I’ve got lots to fill you in on!

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.

Top 10: Things KA Misses

He said these were in no particular order, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the first item would top the list under any and all circumstances.

Chicken wings
Water pressure
Reliable customer service
Clean air
Interesting conversation (I’m trying really, really hard not to take this personally. If I fail, he’ll wake up with a black eye.)
Proper value system (My attempt to argue that this was judgmental was met with a shrug.)
Drinking from the tap
Orderly driving
Quality stuff
Unexaggerated statements

Top 10: Things I Miss

In no particular order:

An international wine selection
Central heating
Gender equality
Tacos
Safe public transportation
Humility
Letting down my guard
Pubs
Specificity
My girlfriends

Indian Media, Its Lack of Faith in the Intellect of Its Readership, and the Fate of Some Cold and Unfortunate Indian Soldiers

The first two sentences of this article by one Manu Pubby on the front page of today’s Indian Express speaks volumes:

If fighting heavily armed insurgents and battling the extreme cold were not enough, army troops posted in Jammu and Kashmir are facing another challenge that is making life even tougher.

Thousands of soldiers posted along the Line of Control (LoC) and in the Kashmir Valley have been issued faulty, ill-fitting winter jackets that are hampering free movement of the arms—essential for quick reaction to threats.

Thank you so much, Manu. Because if you hadn’t pointed it out to me, I would never have realized that free movement of the arms is essential to a soldier’s duties.

Even more shocking news comes later in the report:

Sources say that the Directorate [General of Quality Assurance] is still to institute an inquiry. “It is the DGQA’s job to ensure that equipment delivered for troops is fault-free but it seems that this time it has passed on the blame to the Ordnance Factory Board (OFB),” an official said.

Unbelievable. Who has ever heard of a government body, and an Indian government body at that, passing the blame for a failure on to someone else?

Manu also points out that “Lt Gen G Sridharan, Director General Quality Assurance, could not be reached on the phone and a detailed questionnaire sent to him was not answered.” He failed to explain that this was due to hampered movement of Lt Gen G Sridharan’s arms, since he had swiped a few of the un-quality-assured jackets for himself. It’s damn cold in Delhi these days, too.

The Broken Undersea Cables Swallowed My Homework!

<With that oh-so-innocent look on my face>: “It’s the fault of the broken undersea Internet cables that my blog postings have been so irregular!”

Yeah, the internet connection out here has been so bad that it took me an entire week to post about this event (which occurred somewhere around the 31st of January). Lame excuse, you say? You may be right, but if the world-conquering Indian call centers could be affected, I, the “average Indian web surfer” could too, hai na?

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.