Normal

It's the strangest thing, thousands of miles away from 'home', the same distance from 'normal', in a place that is slowly becoming my most familiar reality to see old feelings and queasy pains rear their ugly heads again, seemingly having burrowed their way from new york to Kolkata, brushing aside their cloaks of dirt and detritus to re-reveal themselves in full glory. In less muddy terms, I feel like I had subconsciously made a rather strange assumption in the first few weeks upon landing here, spontaneously formed in the humid smog that led from the tarmac to the winding city streets. Considering the constant inundation of so many new difficulties and mentalities, every day becoming a process of assimilation and amalgamation, navigating a rough terrain wholly different from home, I had somehow thought that I would be spared from those feelings and that contributed the more average peaks and valleys of life back in Amerika. However, after a couple of the strangest weeks in quite some time, I'm realizing that (perhaps intrinsically tied to the fact that walking down the street is less of a bother than it used to be, that here really is becoming home to one degree or another) these kinds of feelings and ouches are a bit more universal than I may have imagined. If I want this to become my home, my reality, my everyday, than I need to be ok with embracing everything about such a reestablishment. If I want there to be a teleology rather than just a stasis interrupted but nothing besides car horns and packs of street dogs, I'm gonna have to accept the path as it bends and might become torqued and painful in the process. These past couple weeks saw one relationship never permitted to get going despite a rather strong impetus from the opposite member, and another... something... come to a close after a slow souring once I had stopped fooling myself it was something other than what it was.

Foucault, Terracotta, Dumb Fuck, Sociology, Cappuccinos, Street-tea, Facial Hair, Funny Pronunciation, Baggage, Post-coital cookies, Waking up to mist rising from pukurs, Stretchy smiles. Etc.

Done. Finished. It's time for a new start, but not because I've packed up and moved somewhere new, the kind of freshness tied to temporarily and its antecedents. Rather, it's because this is how things go in life. Wayward. But it's kind of comforting to feel these familiar feelings come rushing back clouded in cigarette smoke and a new saltiness in the air. Though through this haziness has also emerged an amazingly close new friendship, and a rather well-cultured shoulder to lean on. Home. Sweet. Home.

Bombs over Bombay

(Note this was written some time ago, during the terrorist attacks... excuse the nonexistant backdate)

I woke up this morning to hear (only after being called from the US) that a spate of bombings and hostage situations have descended on Mumbai, that a Mujahedeen group has decided to pull a series of attacks more alike to the recent bombings in Islamabad - bombing popular western/tourist/expensive institutions with precise large blasts - rather than the less targeted sprinkling of attacks which have occurred in other cities, taking place in crowded markets and main roads but disseminated throughout the area with a just as violent but definitely less focused targets. There are a number of strange aspects of the story so far, particularly in the reactions from the Amerikan media, the Indian media, Kolkata itself as one of the four metros, and... myself. Firstly, while this entire year has seen a tremendous and concerning up tick in the rate of bombings, this is the first story to make the top of the New York Times website, to ascend beyond style columns about dog sweaters and bok choy. Thusly, everyone in the Amerika is reading this event as a single catastrophe that signals a great terrorist takeover of India. This is simply not true. The Indian media has had a much more accurate reading, in my opinion. This event was frightening and meaningful in its degree and exact nature, targets, etc, but more concerning is how it exemplified the lack of training of the police force and the complete failure of their response. While events have been taking place continuously this year, and the lack of proper police action was slowly revealed, it took a drawn out hostage situation to reveal how misguided their efforts and strategy really were.

However, sitting on the opposite end of the country in a state with such an amazingly different socio-political situation, I feel bizarrely unaffected by these events. While everyone reads up on the news in the paper, and 'chi chi's in disgust over both the actions of the terrorists and the poor reactions of the police, people here seem fairly confident Kolkata won't be hit by an attack anytime soon. Yes, the bombs have been going off seemingly everywhere, and Kolkata as one of the metros is a perfect target, but for a variety of reasons and theories Kolkata is not seen as a target by the general public and (they hope) the terrorists themselves. Firstly, Kolkata is just so far east it feels rather aloof and separated from the more entwined Bombay/Delhi Metropolitan swath, and thusly farther away from their politics and issues, and those affixed to them as urban symbols of the larger India. Secondly, a theory held by one of my teachers is that too many Muslim militant groups and jihadists have large Indian centers and communities living in Kolkata, relatively unbothered by the police. If they were to attack so close to their own soil, a police raid is much more likely to occur and also to be be successful. It pays to keep your own lawn rather well-kept and unpocked by bombs I suppose. My most favored theory is that the political scene here is simply too distracted by its own super-local concerns that the greater national dynamic of Hindu/Muslim relations is drowned out to the point of being mute. While much of the rest of the country is being spurred on by the Hindu fundamentalism of the BJP political party as a rising alternative to the secularism of the Congress party, the BJP/Congress presence in West Bengal is almost insignificant. Rather, an intense competition between the 30 years incumbent CPI(M) Communist party and the (literally) grass-roots Trinimul party over highly local and almost entirely areligious issues primarily dealing with the increase of local industry, the decrease of farmland, and (occasionally) scheduled tribe status, dominates the political scene. Safety through a particular kind of chaos and destabilization. Neat!

WW (Wacky Whities) Strike Again

"You're White!"... glee!

I don't tend to go to bars much here, less often the bars attached to the main luxury hotels, the bars that attract and retain the largest possible foreigner/whitey population "out on the town in India" for a night. Though last night after encountering a number of locked doors of more desirable places and their annexed empty alleyways, we went to just such an establishment. There was a cover band fronted by a Bengali woman who despite the ban on public smoking seemed enshrouded in her own kind of sensual haze, playing Amerikan rock classics without even a shred of restraint or irony. There's a certain demographic here that has adopted Amerikan and British classic rock as their own anthem(s), believing in the power of these melodies and lyrics above anything else, and with an intention stronger than anyone I've ever seen before. Brows furrowed in concentration and zeal, eyes pulled tight in moody sacrosanct. More of a show, however, was the nebulous tourist doldrum that occupied much of the middle of the bar floor, made up of half fairly bored and confused faces, the others lost in the ecstasy of being a complete and utter mess. As soon as I got into the bar a girl dressed in last year's big summer fashions (when you're away from the west for too long, you do happen to lose touch after all) flailed her arms in almost frightening excitement and yelled "You're White!... where are you from?" the latter with much less enthusiasm and fervor than the former. This is true, I do happen to actually be exceptionally white. Though my only response was to point out that my friend Tahmid standing at my side whom they had not greeted with such pomp and celebration, while indeed being brown, was also from Amerika. As I sneaked away from this rather contrived and slightly stomach-tipping reception, Tahmid took over rather seamlessly within a few second of it beginning. Apparently all of this girl's tourist friends were leaving the next day, thus leaving her 'homeless', and so after all that she repeatedly asked Tahmid if she could stay with him. He avoided her for the rest of the evening.

On the other side of this tourist encampment was the real mess of the evening, a couple dudes embarrassingly trashed, breaking out into groin-focused dance every few minutes, occasionally falling into people or furniture, or simply grabbing a girl for a moment of dance, usually dropping her, or themselves, or everyone involved, onto the regrettably sticky floor below. The night continued on this queasy path: interesting comments and glances from all directions, punctuated by the slips, falls, or banshee-like yelps of the whiteys somewhere in the immediate distance. Germans looking for a little love on the road, men with ambiguous sexuality momentarily pushing their way into inconvenient spaces to posture before retreating back into the crowd in defeat. Photographers looking to get a picture of (us) whiteys, particularly due to the radiantly blond tresses of my companion. The overall theme of the evening however remained a negatively connoted "wacky whities", sticking in my mind like a sour aftertaste. No wonder we're treated by strangers initially as these horrible, soulless tourists, more likely to pay 200 rupees for a beer at an enclosed sanctum of a bar than to really actually try to understand anything about the place they actually are or even have a simple civil interaction. Because it doesn't matter - when the haze of the night before passes they'll probably pack up whatever knickknacks they've picked up from street vendors at inflated prices over the past few days, get on a train, go somewhere else, and buy a beer. And maybe dance.

Temp

1. A temporary temporality

As I close in on the sixth month mark here, evaluating in which ways I've 'succeeded' and in which ways I've faltered or fallen*, I keep turning on a defining characteristic of the very time I spend here - the temporary nature of it all. No matter how much I feel like I finally belong here, no matter how many fewer stares I get per day or how many more successful conversations I manage to carry off, how much more integrated I become in this neighborhood and its quirky dynamics, always nagging and tugging is how temporary all of this is. All of the friendships, relationships, apartments, ideas, feelings, desires, hatreds, wants, needs... all are based on an assumption of this one momentous moment, with the suspension of the outside world and my life within it. This is a flash that happens to last a few months rather than minutes yet ends all the same, without even the slightest vestige or trace of its glow, no matter how brilliant it had been. This temporality effects more than the obtuse and the diffuse existential mindset, rather it constantly fucks with you, leaving you wondering where you really are and what your situation really is. 'Best friends' disappear back to the west, crowded social schedules suddenly appear vacant and bleak, as the particular tenants in this expatriate boarding home pack up their books and trinkets and head back to a world with stop-lights on every corner and 24 hour delis.
Basically, I feel lonely sometimes even when sitting in front of a friend, their image almost flickering before my eyes with a hollow transparency... poof.

* = My goal being the comically simple aim of actually just existing without too much in the way of defined goals, plans, or desires. In other words, living in someplace very very different for one year, without reading or injecting too much into it, letting it happen as it seems to be inclined rather than trying to force or contrive something different or alien out of it.

2. Again sick

Again tonight I'll go to sleep hoping not to wake up shaking from cold halfway through - a particularly obnoxious effect of my recent bout of sick. The newspapers have been blaring on and on about the 'vector diseases' (malaria, dengue, encephalitis) and their recent rise, pushing me in a fair bit of worry and concern to the doctor today, confused as to the reason behind this fever that has lasted several days now, swinging rapidly between 96 to 102, never seeming to actually abate (a particularly common pattern for malaria). I went to the doctor's chambers at 7 Hindustan Road, a tiny room with half-doors like an old-west saloon, kirtan or baul music (I can never tell the difference outside of guessing) so loud it was difficult for my complaints of headaches and 'loose motion' to be heard, a sikh man with both a turban and a motorcycle helmet (the two often come paired, it's true!) rudely peeping his face over the doors in impatient agitation. The blood test, after much waiting, and the possession and presentation of a number of numbered disks to mark my place in a tumultuous queue, luckily came back negative. I'm still sick, but now I just need to wait it out with heavy doses of antibiotics, happy to know I didn't somehow manage to catch malaria. No malaria! No vector diseases today!

Week ??? (Disappearance, etc...)

I disappeared again. It was accidental, mostly. I think this weekly updating scheme was a bit to ambitious. I often feel too lazy to make these little posts, especially when I'm so unsure if anyone's reading them. Though hearing from a few friends and acquaintances after a recent internet vanishing act makes me want to give it another go. So, here we go.
(This one's going to be a bit long...)

Weather! Scarfs!

These past few weeks have pretty nice, a strange return to a kind of normalcy. The weather has calmed to the point where the air no longer suppresses as it once did, when the shear heat kept the sweat flowing but any ambition to do anything at all mildly interesting at an all-time low. Interesting, I now feel that temperatures in the 60's-70's (ie. 20's c) are downright chilly and frequently need to bundle up in a scarf. I suppose that means I've adjusted, though it remains a bit baffling to feel a shake of a chill when it's still semi-tropical outdoors... as it always is.

Politics (US Election in Indialand)

The amerikan election came and went in Kolkata in a classically unusual and novel fashion. Due to the time difference the polls closed at around 6 in the morning, though luckily the consulate was putting on a results watching party in a smaller ball-room at one of the nicest hotels in town. Fruit-juices, chocolate donuts that reminded me of elementary school birthday celebrations, and miniature pizzas - that were so by name only - abounded, along with a ridiculous supply of pins, the mccain-palin ones remaining mostly untouched. Interestingly, or perhaps expectedly, the demographics of expats living in Kolkata lie heavily in the blue, save for the occasional patron of red, or really more commonly green. Perhaps it's because the group here tends to be fairly young, fairly open-minded, failry well-educated, fairly moneyed enough to be able to take a salary in rupees rather than dollars for a few months that this group of people tend toward the left. I'd be curious if the make-up of the expat communities in other metros like Delhi and Mumbai would be equally so unequal... if this was a trend specifically for the iconified 'neediness' of Kolkata, or if it exists throughout the larger India. As the polls began to get tallied and the sun slowly rose invisibly beyond the velveted and draped walls of our stately compound others began to filter in: the majority of my friends and friends-of-friends here, the volunteer-tourists from sudder-street, the stay-at-home mommies of big amerikan company men, the unmistakable glossiness of nri's temporarily back in residency, the old kurta'ed men there seemingly only for an interest in international politics. Lining the back edge of the auditorium a line of video cameras had been set up by local press and men with large cameras took pictures of occasionally enthused foreigners watching two jumbo-trons bedecked in tricolor (our tricolor) balloon archways.

[In the day that followed the election, the pictures of various expats, particularly the pretty girl ones, graced the covers or inside foreign sections of the newspapers perhaps just as often as the exuberant portrait of Obama himself. I myself was in a few, and of course kept copies of the better ones. Theres something novel about a picture posed with Obama, its subtitles cast in the unmistakable points and curlicues of Bengali]

Soon after breakfast began transmogrifying into mini-pizzas the election almost anti-climatically was called to its well received close, though we lacked the same kind of exuberant punctuation lent by the parades and celebration that I heard about back home in the big cities. We did, however, have a rather large amerikan flag cake and some hearty smiles. Our own sort of proxied celebration, momentarily tied back to our homes not through economic worries ill-fated news, but rather this poetic blessing of change. Sitting in this particularly polyglotic group, watching a self-titled mutt shake his fist in the air on stage as the new president, I felt an embarrassing little surge of giddiness and excitement. The future...? Mixtures, ambiguity, heterogeneity, internationalism, globalism, contradictions and juxtaposition... the future! change!

Varanasi

I visited my friend Davey, living in Sarnath right outside of Varanasi a week or so ago. The train ride itself was a bit of a good old adventure; Me, alone somewhere in northeastern India, in an overnight train for at least 15 hours or so, amused particularly by the varying supplies of snacks sold aboard the train and the occasional invasion of the train cars by packs of Hijras (Those characters that occupy a particularly strange fringe of Indian society, a troop of heavily made up and sometimes strangely disproportionate, their ranks made up of Eunechs, hermaphrodites, transvestities, transgenders, gays, and what have you), clapping and jeering at men frozen stiff in a mockery of deaf and dumb. They'd straddle mens legs gesturing awkwardly, their mouths twisted in a compromise between the Lolita and the aggressor, squawking retorts until men coughed up a few rupees in return for an air kiss not bargained for. Sometime after a tiffin-dinner and before the lights in the car flicked off for sleep, as the train lay idling in a field somewhere, no doubt rice-paddies spread invisible in the darkness beyond the window bars, flashes of light jostled about outside as a hush fell over the cabin. Suddenly people and bags were being rearranged for seemingly no reason as a swarm formed outside the train car, identifiable only by the uniformity of Muslim dress. My fellow berth mates refused to explain what was happening, their mouths clamped below eyed beaming apprehension and some kind of fun. I panicked a bit inside, thoughts of communal violence and muslim-hindu aggression managing to both cloud and cut through the situation. However this group of mohammadean pirates were little more than illegal passengers, boxed out of getting tickets due to the holiday-time uptick of travel, looking to sneak into any space left unoccupied, the panic on board only based in losing a little foot and luggage space, rather than a limb or an eye. I felt a little foolish. Ooops. But eventually I reached my destination without so much a hitch.

I witnessed Diwali (The festival of lights, the symbolic return of Ram back home amongst much celebration and invitation) gearing up in what's supposed to be its festival capital. I was a tourist for a few days, enjoying such things like crusty bread and a wide assortment of pastry, things really only available in tourist enclaves and thusly pretty sparsely found through Kolkata. There was a profusion of swiss, a gaggle of elderly English eating pizza riverside, and only a couple or so Amerikan mingling amongst the Indian population through the alleyways of this city so totally defined by such disparate industries. Firstly, and primarily there's the industry of death, of ritual burning and immersion, an economy based on fortuitousness and the merit of dying and being cremated in this particular spot.

(It's interesting, for a moment to consider the shape of the city with respect to this. Just as the city for so many represents a cosmic threshold, represents the hope and possibility of a better life, or more hopefully its very dissolution... a passage into the grace of nothingness, the city itself seems composed of one immense stark edge - The city sits heaped up along the shores of the Ganga, its density and solidity standing in profound contrast to the absolute nothingness of the river and the sandy flood-plain opposite. Urban and disurban, chaos and perfect emptiness - at night the curl of the city becomes illuminated, the faint bustle of traffic still echoing within its arteries, the flash and giggle of a firecracker carried along its shores, while the mist rolls in to confront it from the river, reflecting back only a faint and diffused echo of its light and life. A shallow reminder of the bustle we all occupy, obliterated in a near absolute and beautiful empty.)

Secondly, (I have strayed... now back to industry/economy), there is the massive tourist industry: The boatmen lining the shores shouting for customers (some boats filled with knick-knacks rather than passengers, which sideline the tour-boats in transit to make a sell), the children selling postcards, floating candles,and bizarre meaningless insignia to be painted on the bony plane between the wrist and thumb. A community of these touristing cosmopolites rummages through these shit-dazzled streets, looking for their own kind of (right of) passage, yet often distracted by the many opportunities to buy flowy pants and patchworks shawls and sling-bags, a kind of fashion that looks like an exotified and fetishized pair of Indian pyjamas, traditionally never worn out of the house and in sum alien to actual 'local' culture. Though in a sense, while this transient population exists liminally in its own way, always taking a train or more often an air-conditioned behemoth of a bus onto the next fanciful destination after a few days, and returning to the safety and austerity of their european espresso makers and smart minimalist furniture usually after a few weeks, in a city like Varanasi they have become their own culture, their own economy, their own market superimposed upon what actually existed in the city that attracted the first visitors, that somehow contrived the 'flowy pant' for sale to these dewy eyed and fair-cheeked spectators. The citizens might be temporary, might be only renting and loaning their small guest-house residences, their membership to their nation, yet this very nature stands permanent, ready to be filled by its fleeting migrants, its funny patrons. All hail the tourist economy, the tourist culture, the tourist nation, marching onwards to the distant horizon, trance music buffered by local percussion blasting around their army, che guereva standing at their helm, dreadlocks flying up in a sudden gust of unusually chilly wind... the wind of our own fleeting mortality, or perhaps only hankering for Thai food or a baguette whilst abroad in the 'fantastic kaleidescope' of India.

Week Sixteen (Idolatrous New Years?)

1. A Shiva Lingam in a Pretty Red Dress

While I had good intentions of joining a few other abroad jews this week for what turned out to be a rather short and sparsely populated Rosh Ha'shanah service (lacking a minyan it didn't take place in earnest), a late night and a later rise got in the way of such things. Instead, I spent the day primarily walking about under a blazing Indian sun, occasionally partaking of my (and others') religious whims. Before a go of rather universalist tashlich, a disowning of sins through the flinging of bread, I went with a friend for a dosa at our beloved and often frequented South Indian Club. After our normal go of things, after the saf/fennel was delivered to the table and the bill was paid amidst the seeds, the fellow who usually says nothing to us besides an exuberant "meals", "special", or the occasional "masala, cheese, etc...", simply pointed us to go upstairs, escorted by a small child. It was clear something was in the air besides a the normal smell of spice and sweat; while eating women had been gathering in the courtyard, sipping cha out of tiny pink plastic cups, looking profoundly satisfied. Without knowing exactly where we were going, but trusting out hosts on the quality of their dosas and the heartiness of their reception, we ended up in a large room with an even larger group of almost entirely middle age women sitting in plastic chairs facing a rather gaudily done up shrine, gossiping and taking little notice of the prayers being sung through two complimentary loudspeakers. Beneath the drapes of shiny plastic ruffles sat a veritable pantheon of gods, elephants, and happily smiling figurines, in attendance to what appeared to be a Shiv-Durga mash-up... a shiva linga done up with a little red and gold outfit, with a portrait of durga displayed behind. Simultaneously a exalted mash-up of the male and female, the paternal and the maternal, and simultaneously a stone penis in a dress. After our fill of banter and shiny things we left, picking up a ziploc baggy each of prasad and a saffron plastic bag filled with coconut, leaves, and a chunk of turmeric. I bought a loaf of "Atta-Shakti" bread - after returning the one that appeared to be full of a small contingent of ants - on the way to the nearby lake, where we proceeded to enjoy tashlich complimented by an at par number of stairs and a scenery of palm trees and concrete condominiums in the distance.

As I flicked the bits of bread into the water and snacked upon the grab-bag of prasad, I wondered more amusingly than seriously about how 'kosher' of a holiday I was conducting, considering the lack of proper hebrew prayer and its traditionally inappropriate replacement with an unexpected but rather satisfying jaunt of idolatry. I'm not quite sure of the answer, but I had to ask myself what is the meaning of a decree against idolatry outside of the context of age-old Canaan, within a world of unitarian monotheisizing Hinduism, in a post-Vivekananda India? Was my not particularly fervent audience before this funny mash-up diety on one of the high holy days an assault upon Jewish values and an action in need of atonement, pled for over the course of this week before Yom Kippur, or was it rather a completely acceptable universalist approach to the holiday, floating in the tides of the oceanic feeling of religion, replacing exact ritual yet preserving mindset and sacristy?

Week Fifteen ('-ism's, dead things, cellphones, batches)

1. Thinking about '-ism's while running, a good thing?

Kolkata is not a 'Cosmopolitan City', as so often proudly touted. I'm not actually criticizing the city for its very nature, only stating that proclaiming cosmopolitanism might be a little audacious and hasty, might indicate the desires of a certain upwardly mobile middle class, rather than reality itself. To explain, before moving here I was incredibly excited about the prospect of living within Indian cosmopolitanism, about the chance to live in a city where given a little bit of time I would be able to assimilate and no longer carry with me the stigma of some inherent 'otherness'. Thinking about this while running through the park today, pocketing my usual collection of stares as I went about my business, I've realized that a truly 'cosmopolitan' city is a nexus of otherness itself, a collection of others existing within the bounds of a placeless and global culture more connected to its inhabitants and their global networks than to its intrinsic geography. If a city exists within a true state of cosmopolitanism, a true dissolution of differentiation and hierarchical citizenship, then in addition to its culture, its very citizens should be global and to some degree placeness, creating a moment of difficulty when attempting to identify real citizenship. Meaning, in New York City, one of the most cosmopolitan of all cities, there is no way to determine by color, nationality, religion, or even language who is or isn't a true citizen of the city and its culture. The city exists as such a conglomeration of cultures and people that the global, the international, the other becomes the very fabric and constituency of culture and society. It is through this very ease with which one can assimilate and appear the citizen that the contest of true 'New York' citizenship arises, more an indicator of social issues such as gentrification than a mark against cosmopolitanism. In contrast, in Kolkata, I will never be considered a citizen, will never be considered anything other than a foreigner no matter how long I stay here. By the very fact that assimilation here is ultimately impossible is to me an iron-clad indication of anti-cosmopolitanism.

This might be an errant definition; I'm not sure of the actual dictionary entry. However, how else can a city's cosmopolitanism be measured? Should it be measured by its culture, by the number of foreign influences at play, by the number of foreign foods available and the degree to which they might eventually become mundane and familiar, by the number of foreign goods and brands sitting gleaming on store shelves, their prices converted into local currency and carrying within a hidden import fee? By these measures Kolkata is nearing a penultimacy of cosmopolitanism: Imported gouda cheese available by the over-priced kilo, American and European music tinkly away in air-conditioned malls, English literature available in stacks sitting near most major intersections. However, it is the very conscious repeated use of the word 'foreign' that indicates these things indicate a global economy, yet a culture and people who remain ultimately local. Foreignness is fetishized rather than becoming a readilly recognizable culture itself.

Furthermore, culture is not divorced from its people who lend it form and affect. If the color of a person's skin immediately makes one an outsider no matter the circumstances, to the point where it becomes clear one will never be able to assimilate into society at large, yet simultaneously this foreigner's culture is being enthusiastically commodified and consumed as exciting, Western, and novel, isn't there a fault of hypocrisy at work? Symbols of larger cultural systems cannot be appropriated piecemeal and superficially as entertainment and considered cosmopolitanism if they are completely divorced from an acceptance of foreigners themselves, the building blocks of this culture. No matter how much Kolkata becomes international and global in its culture, accepting the material and thoughts of the 'other' and attempting an ownership thereof, without ever actually accepting the other as the citizen himself, without seeing the local and the global dissolve into a simultaneous singularity of otherness and cosmopolitan identity, Kolkata will never become cosmopolitan. The day someone of white skin or some other obviously distinguishing mark of otherness can walk down the street without a single hoot or holler, without being thrown terms for 'foreigner' as insults in and of themselves, will be the day that this city can truly proclaim its cosmopolitanism, rather than merely holding up a false facade of global culture while simultaneous rejecting a global citizenry.

2. Dead things in streets

Today on the way to school we passed a dead body being carried by a few-dozen person strong funeral party westward along the main road. The body was lain upon a stretcher, completely covered with white flowers save to dark weathered looking feet emerging from the bottom. The followers steps seemed oddly peppy and jolly, like their were on a fantastic morning walk. As the body passed bystanders on the sidewalk stood and turned, doing penance to this anonymous dead body lost in a tidy current of lillies. Later, while walking back from a momo and jaggery yogurt dinner I stepped on the head of an enormous and mostly squished rat lying in the street, its body flattened yet its head remaining solid and pristine. A shout from a friend kept me from actually stepping down with any force, not actually crushing... popping the head beneath my foot but a felt the gentle pressure around the ball of my foot of a rat head through the thin soles of my flip flops today. I consider that an accomplishment of sorts.

3. Sabzi Wallah Cellphone

The Sabzi Wallah Kid (the passing subject of many past entries) got a new cellphone very recently. He likes it a lot and plays with it while sitting on the sacs of potatos. It is also a music player so he listens to it with earbuds, though so loud it every jaunty Indian beat is audible. Everything (cellphones, movies, horns) is incredibly loud hear, probably because everyone is partially deaf from the constant buzz of traffic. He sits outside most days on the side of the road so he must have quite a bit of hearing loss. But at least he can now play Xenia Snake and Pocket Carrom at his liesure.

4. Ten times dissonant

Listening to M.I.A. in...

01. (India)
02. A place often called 'The Third World'
03. A place called 'The Developing World'
04. A place dominated by a 'brown' population
05. A place where there is a constant ebb and flow of terrorist activities and bombings
06. A place where people regularly march and protest in the streets
07. A place where hammer and sickles are emblazoned on most buildings
08. A place where most people haven't heard of M.I.A. and wouldn't understand her language
09. A place where urban and social infrastructure is in constant decay and degradation
10. A place where words like 'left-front', 'communism', 'opposition-group' (etc) mean something

...is really strange and brings about a funny guilty nausea.

Week Fourteen (Deus Ex.... Chinese Moonscape)

This week two detached but rather fun anecdotes from the more sundry moments of the recent day to day...

1. Deus ex Machina

Walking to the institute, my roommate noticed several of the cars we were passing had a touch of flair added to their hoods, sitting in stark contrast to the blustery monsoon sky overhead: a garland of marigolds tenderly draped across a gleaming grill or banana leaves tucked behind the ears of a set of headlights, creating a jaunty torch-like effect. Seeing as these decorations were fairly subtle by Indian standards, and rather well dispersed, I thought nothing of it. However his suspicions of a 'machinery' puja taking place were in fact correct. Wednesday and Thursday this past week marked a two-day puja to our leaden cohabitants. As the day wore on more cars plied the streets in similar style, as buses hurtled down busy streets bedecked across the whole of their boxy torsos in a network of garlands and tinsel, like overweight pubescents on the way to prom. Factories big and small closed up, the machinery given a couple days rest while the workers themselves apparently employed themselves with drinking and hollering. Even tiny xerox booths on the street were shuttered, their door-jambs peppered with flower petals, book-ended by tiny green coconuts and terracotta. The neurological scanning clinic on the ground floor of my building was closed, also bedazzled. Pujas have blossomed suddenly on the streets, and the use of a rather friendly, benign, female deity for the representation of this mechanized god is quite interesting. While at first this rather graceful tender figure seemed discordant with the clang and soot of a taxi or a backyard coal hopper, on second thought it makes perfect sense within the common misogynistic perspective. Just as a machine does a man's will under his expectations, never straying save for a malfunction or wear and tear for which he is ultimately responsible, so does this ultra-feminine, delicate goddess represent and fulfill an idealized patriarchal power dynamic. And so man's manifestations of cogs and ball bearings gain something very obviously akin to his desired plunder and domination of the sweetly perfumed bosom. Oh, elbow grease...

2. Chinese Industrial Moonscape with Restaurant (and Bar)

I went the wrong way to get somewhere yesterday. In Kolkata there are a couple 'china-towns', though while I can't speak for the one I have not yet visited, the older 'Tangra' neighborhood Chinatown was nothing like the mixture of sheen and grit that can be found in Amerikan Chinatowns - the familiar strings of alternating fish markets and bubble tea shops spun about a collection of blocks effacing the downtown of most major cities. I'm still not entirely sure if I saw the real 'China-town', though it was where I was pointed to as I asked tea-sipping old-folk on the street for the 'China-lokder jayga', or the 'place of the China people'. (To backtrack for a moment, how I ended up where I did end up...) Rather than asking locals or friends how to get to this part of the city, and where to go within it, I decided that I could simply walk east towards it from a point along the subway route, and sooner or later easilly run into it, red bean buns and paper lanterns announcing my arrival with great pomp. However, Kolkata is not a city of continuity and gradual variation. Rather, through the rather fierce segmentation of the city by railroads, highways and flyovers, government and army installations, and anything else large and imposing, along with social and religious division, what appear to be condensed rural villages suddenly appear along the road leading from a posh inner-city suburb, rice paddies and water tanks interspersed with shopping malls and high-rise condominiums without obvious patterns or planning. Thusly, rather than enjoying a simple walk from downtown Kolkata, from the crowds of shoppers buying their new limes and vermilions for puja, to the golds and maroons of a friendly Chinatown, I first spent an inordinate amount of time walking through neighborhoods of car repair shops and wholesale foam-goods distributors, followed by finding myself caught up in the tumult of the second main train station, Sealdah. I began to cross over the station by way of confusing curving elevated highways with sidewalks, skipping over what momentarily became pastoral below, women in bright saris sauntering about the grass between the railroad tracks below. As I continued, from this point onwards the stares I recieved became more frequent and intense, a mixture of mild hostility and curiosity growing more palpable for the sweaty whitey walking around neighborhoods that have names to very few. Roads gave way to dirt, until suddenly a hollowed skeleton of a partially constructed apartment building thrust from the slowly quieting streets below, a collection of auto-rickshaws at its base. A short ride on one took me through a series of rambling streets as urbanity faded away, dropping me off in an intersection almost identical to that I had come from. With narry a dumpling in sight I asked for the way to 'bhalo chini-khabar' (good Chinese food) and was directed along a road that after a sharp right turn shrank to a 1-lane, yet surprisingly meticulously paved road, winding amongst ever rising window-less walls, laced and fringed by barbed-wire yet unclear in the reason of their state of lockdown.

At this point things took a turn towards the beautiful surreal, as normal physical spaces and organization gave way to a completely new world that evoked feelings of Utah canyons, a desaturated moonscape, and soviet Russia. This was a neighborhood of tanneries and barracks, many now closed down yet their shells infilled with family apartments, a number of Chinese characters emblazoned on the entrance, perhaps also adorned by an adorable shiny porcelain kitty-cat waving hello and saluting in good luck. These massive structures stood in contrast to the irregular piecemeal jumble of Kolkata architecture that spills itself out upon its streets with little sense of privacy or seclusion. Stark solids with faced eachother across the narrow streets with little perforation or variation, studded by windows nonetheless darkened and masked by screens. While I heard the occasional waft of Chinese verbiage, emanating from an aggravated mother or a television variety program, they remained hidden behind their domestic fortresses, a few spare inhabitants venturing out but strictly atop shiny motorbikes, streaking through these grayed industrial canyons their pale cheeks and cheerfully colored outfits, a smeared memory of color left mingled in their exhaust, bizarre horsemen for this apocalyptic scene. Narrow streets were lined with moat-like gutters, a dark sludgy water idling by, its surface bound by an iridescent membrane, overtones of blue, purple, and silver redundantly driving home these gentle brooks' toxicity. They were wide enough to require a system of tiny bridges - some as simple as a concrete slabs laid across the banks, others more elaborate, feigning Chinese or sometimes orientalized Japanese silhouettes and embellishment.

As I wandered about these endless twisting lanes, I never finally found the 'china-town' I had been hoping to find: lines of stall-sized stores and restaurants, steamed buns and cheap produce. Rather, installed into the sides of these converted tanneries were massive restaurants, announcing their locations deep within the folds of the neighborhood by way of billboards hoisted high above the walled city below. Each proudly touted its bar which, combined with their rather desolate state of emptiness, was an obvious indication that 4 in the afternoon was not the high time to wander about in search of good food and memories of home. After a bowl of rather viscous sweet corn soup at the Hakka House, recommended by a rather jolly man with poor teeth and a plaid lungi wandering about and rather comically upfront about his Muslim background, I stumbled out of the confines of this ghetto, now standing on the edge of a highway, opposite a lush pond fringed with palm trees, traffic whizzing by. Ironically, this was an area I knew, and also knew to be easily traveled and within an hour of my house. A ride on another auto-rickshaw, the electric trolley, and finally a short walk by foot brought me back home in about a third of the time it took to get there originally. However, I'm glad for my solitary errant wander, having gotten a chance to get profoundly lost, feeling a vertigo that has become more unfamiliar each day, grounding myself through the help of many strangers and conversations in surprised Bengali.

As I've gotten more comfortable here, surrounding myself in a small bubble of friends and the familiarity of South Kolkata, this sort of wonderfully confusing wandering has become less frequent, the feeling of truly being in a foreign place fleeting, my life lacking in the novelty and profoundness with which this place is in fact quite richly endowed. As the monsoon ebbs away I hope to get back into this occasional habit, setting out with just enough money to get home in case of emergency, alone, relying on little more than a vague sense of direction and destination, and seeing what happens.

Sadly, I actually took only a single photo to document this particular jaunt... will post when camera works again.

Week Thirteen (Return)

Back. In India.

In a funny way this return voyage has had an element of symmetry with my short return to Amerikan soil: Strange in and of itself, and also strange in how normal and unpeculiar it all really felt, despite the feeling that all of this should be feeling much more surprising and unusual than it really is. Life picked up where it left off, albeit a little smaller and brighter than it was a few weeks ago. Smaller in a figurative sense, my circle of friends having shrunk considerably (and the current trajectory shows it becoming even tinier), many friends having returned the United States, leaving me a little less entertained than before. Brighter in a literal and definitively non-figurative sense, the tail-end of the monsoon leaving the skies clearer than ever and the sun potently strong, turning the concrete planes of the city into blazingly hot radiation, the outdoors becoming a daunting proposition for most of the day save for a few hours in the very early morning and the evening. The light before I left here was predominantly yellow and red, hot yet sympathetic. Now it's a piercing white, shrinking pupils and inciting groans (at least on my part).

For better or worse it's nice to be back... Palm trees everywhere, piles of trash lining the streets, the occasional cow meandering by, deafening car horns at all hours, that distinctive smell, frustrating and demeaning shouts coming from packs of pubescent boys roaming in packs, religion everywhere and nowhere at once.

The city is getting ready for Durga Puja, in early October, the biggest festival of the year for Kolkata. Temporary temples called pandals are sprouting up all over the city, behemoths of bamboo, tarpaulin, grass, mud, and whatever else is available, subsuming entire parks, streets, and intersections. Every neighborhood collects amongst themselves a ridiculous amount of money to fund these things which stand in their full glory for only a couple weeks. Interestingly, these don't have strictly 'religious' forms, taking on popular motifs and visages - last year's one of the largest in a development called Salt Lake took on the look of the Hogwart's castle, while a fairly revolutionary decentralized design down the street from me is transforming an intersection into what appears to be a pueblo village. I'm attaching a few in-progress photos, but I'm sure things will get more interesting once adornment gets underway.





In other news, while I genuinely do like this place, I'm still often upset by the heteronormativity, pseudo-religiosity, dim-witted 'intellectualism', and hypocrisy that tend to remain under the surface and noninvasive most of the time - relegated to an unfortunate but omnipresent minority - yet also have the tendency to arise in unison...

...That line of thinking was just now interrupted by a rather confusing conversation with my cleaning woman wherein at first I thought she was scolding me for wearing tshirts when I leave my house, saying they're a bad thing to wear for kids my age, though I soon realized she meant I should give her any clothing I don't want when I leave the country for her son who is my age because the clothing he wears is of bad quality. Same words, just with a slightly different arrangement and a hugely different meaning. It happens sometimes... but when things finally make sense it makes me rather pleased. I think I'll give her an extra shirt in addition to the traditional Durga Puja tip.

At one point she said her son has the same body shape as myself, albeit a few inches shorter, yet for the first second it sounded like she was calling me fat.

Oh the joys of foreign language.

My mind has derailed.
See you in a week, internet friends.

Week eleven-twelve (amerika)

It seems only proper to continue this little self-examining venture while on my short hiatus back in the United States, since while every day in India is a barrage of new cultural and sensational blasts – coming in staccato in an ether of dust and rosewater – this time away contributed to refocusing my impressions of my two concurrent 'home' cities, Philadelphia and New York, along with the greater Amerikan psyche and stasis. Already, the first moment back on domestic soil I had my first Sartre-esque pang of misanthropic nausea, as nasalized Amerikan voices rang out in pointless complaint in line in the immigration hall. In the USA there is a pervading fear of silence, that a couple moments without words shared between friends or family somehow serve to reveal a fragility and lacking within the relationship, discrediting its very existence. A second without banter irreconcilably results in knots in stomachs and a a fear-ridden wave of boredom strikes itself upon the faces of all those involved. A pallor develops, along with an incessant need to jabber about something, anything, if only to restore the color in one's jowls.

However it seems that in India these moments are accepted and perfectly allowed, the silence able to permeate the air and hang thickly for several minutes, broken by little more than a cough or the patient chewing of (perhaps) a lukewarm dosa or clump of dal-soaked rice. It is not that Amerikans are somehow magically blessed with an innate knack for witty conversation; rather lulls in conversation are filled with frivolous complaint and often audaciously self-interested and subconsciously prideful pronouncements. There is no passivity, no acceptance, no realization of the minuscule nature of our self-engineered universes of thought and action. While I thought the drone of familiar Amerikan accents might be a welcome sound, instead I stood there largely disappointed in the situation, in 'my people', wistfully wishing myself into the complicated but generally - on a macrocosmic level – more humble and passive culture I had momentarily left behind in India.

'I am on vacation for two weeks in the United States' - A phrase I have pronounced jokingly many times but slowly am realizing the queasy truth to it. I frankly feel like a tourist - not in that I've really been out of country for a hugely long time, but rather that I feel completely untied from this place. I have no obligations, no relationships in flux or requiring of transformation, modulation, moderation. It's rather akin to the same depressing melancholy I experienced when I first got to Kolkata. But now these two places, cultures, spheres are reversed in my mind and my relationship to them. This is novel, of course, but simultaneously oddly exhilarating and alarming. I suddenly feel as if the tourist in the place I've grown up in for so many years (and I repeat this sentiment not so much due to weak or redundant writing, but rather to suggest the ridiculous frequency with which this thought and creeping fear skitters about my mind).

I come back to this city, to New York, yet I feel as if I am floating above, under, and through the crowds, separate and distinct - albeit a feeling inhabiting my own mind and probably not felt or observed by others, who most probably see me as just another face in the crowd rather than an aberrant 'stranger'. (Unlike the case as the rare whitey in Kolkata) I go back to old haunts and new - my brownstone of 2 years, gay bars and clubs, diners and subway cars - each cultural condition now obviously so Amerikan, so unique to this place, blindly stumbling along assuming of their own right of existence and validity without realizing their cultural exceptionalness, the amazing circumstances that have allowed for their formation and continued existence. A mixture of stomach churning brash audaciousness... things so worthy of celebration, parades, sociological texts!

Twinky 20-somethings gyrating on the dance floor to remixed Beyonce, skin sticky with weak vodka tonics, sweat, and probably the saliva of at least a couple of their compatriots, blissfully unaware of the very different circumstances this lifestyle might confront throughout the rest of the world over. And yet, this blissful unawareness, eyelids half closed from the bright lights scooping arcs over the crowd, is in fact a championing of our modern/western social liberalism, an achievement. One can dance with abandon without worry of violating a constitutional amendment (as in India) and ironclad expectations of family and society. My feelings are scrambled and confused, momentarily I want to condemn these people and their narrow perspectives, yet at the same time I want to cheer this brazenness, this thrilling unawareness and the leaps and bounds our society had to have made to allow for this display of ironically basic and instinctual expression, left unencumbered by concern and the potential of real, loaded condemnation.

(NB: To explain the now rather standardized use of the word 'Amerikan' in my posts, seeing as American in truth does not in fact only imply the United States, yet United States-y seems a bit cumbersome to use as an adjective or for citizenry, I've substituted in Amerika/Amerikan, also making a bit of a conscious reference to the ideologies and discussions of the YIPpies back in the day. Though I suppose it's a bit hypocritical of me to make this kind of allusion, considering this whole jaunt is being funded by the good ol' Amerikan gubberment... ha?)

Week Eight-Ten (Retrograde)

I apologize for my apparent disappearance from the world these past few weeks, though on the advice of a number of people, I'll return to my regular weekly entries upon my return to India in a few days (And also will be posting a special Amerika addition touching on my momentary re-immersion back 'home', written primarily on street corners and in public transportation in the dual orbiting satellites of New York and Philly).

I'm not going to recount everything that finished up my last few weeks of summer in India, though I will post a couple more fruit pictures I valiantly took, but explain away my disappearance in a summarizing manner. Mostly, I suppose I stopped writing because we got an internet connection in our apartment so instead of doing more useful things I endlessly browsed the New York Times website, excusing my laziness as a requisite 'need to stay connected' to 'issues in the United States'. Reading articles on new restaurants and little old women traipsing through the upper west side do not however qualify as pertinent issues. Right now the internet is disconnected and it might stay that way.

More importantly however, my lapse stems from the recent development of a bona fide 'life' developing for me in India, meaning I'm living a little less in my head and more in the world, with people and new acquaintances (both local and foreign) and have recently found myself occasionally busy, a strange change in the mindset of my day to day. This means less time blatantly set aside for staring at ceilings, sweating, and thinking, and more time doing and seeing and thinking as a side effect in between. Also this means some more private and less PG things happening in my life that I don't quite feel comfortable posting on a general 'travel' blog. I want to write about these things but might figure out a way to divvy them out privately. A new small notebook now rests at my side so that I might blog on paper and then type it in later, a tactic that served me well whilst in the United States.

Long story short: a promised return, a more interesting and less redundant line of thought, exciting adventures (one hopes), and eight more months ahead of me back in India.

Week Seven (Fruit, Culture, Etc)

I guess I've gotten to a point these days living here in Calcutta that drastic mood shifts and daunting new perspectives no longer dominate my life. Instead I feel like I'm acclimating to the point of being able to see and experience the smaller things, the actual bits and pieces that are all ticking away to form this city and thereby shaping my experiences here. Because I feel like I can cope with most things this place decides to through at me, errant incidents become amusing rather than disappointing and mind-numbing, the daily dealings become something I can control and shape rather than something I'm simply subjected to. I must say, It's kind of neat. Though, as a consequence, the sort of thesis-bound blogging I've been doing these past few weeks doesn't seem to work to well for my current state of things and mind, thusly instead I'll be sharing a few bits and pieces of things of late, and if there is some ideology or sentiment in fact binding them all together, I suppose I'll see it by the end.

Produce:

Vegetables and fruit here are immensely cheap and abundantly sundry, thus lending themselves to a lot of experimentation on my behalf. While eating a vegetable without quite knowing its name or purpose is always a bit problematic, as improperly prepared it might adhere to all the surfaces of one's mouth in a sticky-sandpapery kind of way, or just taste like chlorophyll-y poo, the purchase and consumption of mysterious fruit has become a bit of a hobby of mine. All you need to is buy a kilo of whatever “for today” rather than “for tomorrow” to ensure ripeness, haggle the guy down 25-50% of his original price (the longer the pause and distracted gaze away from your direction upon asking the price, the more it's being jacked up, an observation that has become a fine component of my haggling methodology), maybe get it's name in at least Bengali and Hindi, and a new fruity adventure is yours! While guavas, ripe to the point of becoming like an odd custard with seeds, have become a larger component of my diet than I had ever expected them to, lots of strange fruits with names I may or may not know abound, and while I'm coming at this a bit late, having already not photographed the yields of the short seasons of some of the more obscure fruits, I'll begin my fruit-phlog now with the Sitaphal (Hindi) or A(t/d?)aphal (Bengali?):

This odd fruit has been deemed the 'custard apple' by the British, a proper name to express its rather giving texture. When ripe the fruit can be simply broken apart along the seams of its scales, each scale on the outside reflecting a big black seed on the inside surrounded by a layer of fruit a bit like lychee's but more giving, and tasting more of pear and apple, mild and kind of funny. While maybe not mind-bogglingly delicious, falling short of such delicacies as fine blushed mangoes, the sitaphal is good fun, I must say, and the sound of seed after seed hitting my plate is oddly reassuring of good things to come, that perhaps life will go on improving with every fulfilling plink. (This may be quite an exaggeration, and I don't think I actually gain personal restitution through eating this fruit, but I like the idea of being able to do so.)

The Mish Mash:

One of the neat parts of having been here for a while, especially in a city that really is relatively metropolitan and cosmopolitan, is starting to see the parts for the whole, no longer just experiencing this place as “India” but rather as a rather special condition within a larger Indian culture, and made up of a huge number of influences, but local and from abroad. Especially comparing this place to my experience in Chandigarh, a city of a very strong Panjabi and Sikh culture with many fewer complexities and aberrations thrown into the mix, I've definitely come to appreciate what a neat mixed up place this is. I also feel like I'm a part of it all, an Amerikan Bideshi here for long enough to pick up a number of local customs, habits, and cultural tid-bits, while decidedly preserving and projecting huge bits of my own cultural perspective and exuding it through my thoughts and actions. There's a certain giddy thrill that comes from recollecting a particular night or day, realizing what a funny mixture of things have all cooperated or contested to form whatever experience might have just occurred. For instance, last night I had a couple of other Amerikans over for dinner, a celebration of raw foods over the generally over-cooked squishiness of Indian food, but tinged yellow with turmeric and eaten with lemons and onions in big hunks, a very Indian culinary habit. After, we went to the house of a Bengali friend they had made at a Baul concert, a rather spaced-out man nearing 50 with a son in his low teens, and a French live-in (lover?) of 29 years who's been here for a few months, bearing stories of Europe and acidic fly-bites from the Sudan. The concept of the 'third culture' came up in conversation, the idea of identities and cultures emerging out of mixed contexts and contributions which got me wondering if in fact I'm slowly becoming part of this third culture. Do you have to be born into it, its ambiguity developing from a geographically contorted childhood and a confused sense of nationality, or can the third culture be developed and appropriated through a mix of preserving one's own culture while adapting and settling into a new one, neither remaining fully separate or really assimilating, but straddling the line, contributing while simultaneously absorbing and filtering? At least I have been developing this pleasing ambiguous feeling that surges up whenever (usually grammatically poor) Bengali dribbles out of my mouth without me noticing, or I understand bits of Hindi being shouted across the street mixed up with popular English – all of these linguistic aspects tied up into cultural and geographical activities and identities of those speaking them. But I'm digressing...

The rickshaw ride over was complicated by the late hour and the fact that our directions were given in terms of a sweet shop (Bengali: Mishti Dokan) by the name of Mithai, which literally means sweet in Hindi, leading to the rickshaw-wallah thinking we were looking for any ol' sweet shop at 11 at night, when of course they were all closed. The situation was rectified with a little bit of Bengali that the guy understood, though I think the lesson from this and many other experiences I've had these past few weeks is that I really need to reinforce what little Hindi I know from last year and build upon it over this next year, because nobody is ever really speaking only Bengali or Hindi or English, but rather a mash of all of them, and it's come in handy when I've known both the Bengali and the Hindi of certain words, and always a bit embarrassing when I only know the Bengali, or detrimental and problematic when I only know the English. So, in addition to my goal of getting good at the harmonica, I now have the goal of learning Hindi. See, it's a cultural mish-mash! It's great!

A pleasing cap to the evening took the form of strange late night religiosity. While walking through my neighborhood on my way home, aside from rickshaw-wallahs sleeping beside their carriages and the packs of dogs dozing nearby, the only other people out at that hour were small packs of young men and the occasional woman, jingling away with some kind of religious accoutrement for whatever holiday it apparently is. They were mostly dressed in a strong orange-saffron, strips tied around their heads and wider strips forming lungis for down below. Slightly flexible sticks with weights and bells on each end sat upon their shoulders, so that the bells would chime and clang with each step. Chants of unfamiliar words reverberated against the barren canyon-walls and a light tinkling silence was left in their wake. I could still hear them in the shower.

Week Seven (Miniature)

Strange lumps and a swollen left hand (spider bites?) have come and gone in less than 24 hours. Maybe this means my immune system is getting stronger. I think I had an argument the other day and essentially dissed the other party (my neighbor) in a coy and roundabout, but definitely obvious way, all in Bengali. This, to me, is a sign that I am perhaps actually becoming more able in this language. Perhaps. In other news, hoping that Lufthansa doesn't decide to go on strike when I'm supposed to be going home, because that would be quite annoying. Though I guess being stuck in a foreign country is best done when under the jurisdiction of the US State Department, right?

Week Six (Still in India)

So, rather surprisingly this week flew by without much notice at all. I sort of knew this would happen, considering how fast the second half of my last summer in Chandigarh went by, but I wasn't expecting the time warp to be as extreme as I've perceived it. A big part has definitely been this intensifying self-confidence and feeling (and more importantly ability) of knowing this city. My wandering down back roads and purposely walking new routes each time I need to get somewhere is starting to pay off, as more and more often I can visualize this city as a continuum of streets, landmarks, and directions rather than isolated shops and intersections reached by auto-rickshaw or metro. While of course I still get lost upon occasion and am often completely unassisted by Google maps when looking for a new address (The Google Maps system just doesn't cope well with a city as jumbled as Calcutta, with numerous twisting alleyways and self-determined addresses such as 52D Hindustan Park, 16/8 Goriahat, etc... This is a city where a building might claim an address tied to a street it's not even on, usually around the corner, but sometimes a good block away, It doesn't quite make sense). Also, It definitely helps that my Bengali seems to be improving rather consistently, meaning I can actually get answers from most people to questions I need answered and can get by with my day to day less shrouded in a mysterious haziness brought on by a lack of language. Of course, just as I still get lost in this city despite my increasing mental almanac of streets and places, There are definitely a constant stream of moments, and sometimes days where I feel like I know absolutely nothing once again, and I'm a completely new transplant into this language and culture, bumbling misunderstood replies and losing whatever is being said to me in a heavy cloud of the Bengali vowels and consonants, buzzing about but meaning nothing. Or sometimes perhaps I know every word being said to me in isolation, but due to idiom or an unexpected context, they make absolutely no sense to me. Oh well.

Another helping factor these days of late has been the fact that I actually have been doing things to fill my days besides going to class, wandering around in the heat, and eating snacks (though these are all fine activities in their own right). I've been frequenting the apparently rather large collection of art galleries in Calcutta, which instead of being collected into one particular district lie scattered throughout residential neighborhoods, including many in my own or in other areas close by in Southern Calcutta. So now while I go to class in the mornings, I wander to an art gallery, and have a snack on the way home. Four activities rather than three! It fills up a day! Also, Bengali's seem to be rather fond of art films (defined loosely as any film that doesn't progress its plot forward with dance and singing breaks every 10 minutes... cough... Bollywood) and there are free screenings amazingly often. I've now been to three of varying quality, but it makes for pretty good language practice while being entertained and getting out of the house. Also, there's something to be said for the amount of culture one comes to understand a little better through the lens of a camera... values, ideas, beliefs, and desires all being directed towards fulfilling a plot but free to be gleaned and understood as greater patterns and facets of the greater society that produced these films. One of the most constant undertones in all these films is this huge ongoing struggle of identity and change, of facing the realities of modernity and the loss of the past, an overwhelming melancholy than seems to seep out of the ubiquitous concrete walls and nests of quivering telephone wires that have come to define the modern/urban space of India and West Bengal. The allusion to the ancestral home is constant, particularly if it is a rural village home under bluer skies and date palms, moored in a sea of rice paddies. There is a distrust of the currently developing Indian identity, bound up in individuals but also particularly in these physical spaces they inhabit, the urban modernity versus the rural traditionality.

Also, It looks like my streak of relative social isolation might be coming to an end, as I'm hoping that the number of a friend of a friend living in Calcutta might provide me with that first link into a social life in this city. If not, if it doesn't deliver these high expectations I'll be alright with it, but I'm definitely hoping these parts of my life begin to change just as much as the other bits and pieces. Also, through a party this last weekend I've met a few people who by my guesses constitute that majority of the South Calcutta expat community, including a guy who It turns out I had eaten pizza with along with a mutual friend just over a year ago, up in Northern Manhattan near the cloisters before sneaking in and taking in some fine views of the Hudson. (Small word). Another hope is that these contacts might lead to a slight widening of my social circle here... though we'll see.

As an aside, and in reference to this weekend's gathering, Lately, I've been increasingly amused by this strange lifestyle I and my fellow students have come to hold over these past six weeks, becoming more obvious as time goes on and we become more acclimated to this city and its culture. It's this funny way of life that is a weird kind of equilibrium formed by our own cultural sensibilities that we have less fear of expressing and exerting, and the culture that indeed creates the context and parameters for all of our decisions and actions. We are living a very western life simultaneous and superimposed on Indian circumstance, leading to some beautiful cultural mish-mashes that from one step back are pretty consistently hilarious.

For example, we needed to get some whiskey last night and the following conversation took place via text-message between my friend and myself, perfectly encapsulating this great (at least mostly) peaceful clash of cultures, of our experiences and normatives pushed into an Indian context and its limitations. I have provided some contextual notes in parentheses:

Friend: Hey ben – do you have whiskey or will we need to pick some up?

Me: We need to buy some. I can do it or you can send your kajer lok. (basically a house servant, of a pretty low status and occupational connotation, translating literally as 'man of work') Tell me what you would rather. Yea! Whiskey! Friends!

Friend: Our kajer lok is on chuti (vacation/break) and his sub is a thread wearing brahmin (this caste-level doesn't drink by a rule, a rule that is occasionally broken or ignored though is a rule nonetheless) so if you're willing, I may take you up on your offer-i will pay though since i don't think i did for bishnupur. (Remember Bishnupur? Rural West Bengal...)

And of course while buying my whiskey from the liquor store, a barred-up window affair that requires you to stand in the street as you buy your sinful beverages, open to any judgment from a passerby, a guy who spoke terrible English but insisted upon it over the use of Bengali came up to me and (I think) was demanding to know if I drank Vodka, and if not why I didn't like it, all the while claiming himself a threaded Brahmin and thus not a drinker. However, he seemed rather fond of Vodka and was loitering outside a liquor store, so who knows what he was really up to. Point being, as exhibited in both that texted back and forth, and my altercation with the 'brahmin' on the street, there's a huge novelty, at least for me, in these hilarious juxtapositions of Amerikan style drinkin' on the weekend with the ubiquity of house 'help' for anyone of a certain class her in India and the mores of thread-wearing brahmnical social divisions.

In other news, still failing gloriously in my search for an urban planning ngo to work with here. While I've found information for a handful online, every email I send either bounces back immediately as a defunct address, or flies off into the bowels of Indian cyberspace without so much as a disinterested reply. Though in general I've been doing good here and don't feel quite as lost or bored, I really need to do something at least mildly useful with myself. We'll see. I'll hope.

Week Five (Mayapur: A Religious Disneyland of Vaishnaism)

This week's general theme has been a bit of a spate of bad luck, nonetheless mixed with some satiatingly wacky Indian times and such. While I had momentarily staved off the sickness that seemed to be ravaging our group after our return from Bishnupur, eventually I succumbed and my plans to go to Puri for the long weekend were dashed. There would be no friendly sandy beaches to enjoy or Orrisian signs to confuse, as it was clear I would be confined to West Bengal for the weekend. My health ebbed back to some kind of manageable demeanor, so I joined another student, a former Hare Krishna devotee to the ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness... ie. Hare Krishna) temple, or rather religious compound in Mayapur, a religious nexus for Hindus situated in a kink in the Ganges a few hours north of Calcutta. Things seemed to be picking up; our train was mostly empty leading to the rather comfy occupation of an entire sleeper compartment by just the two of us, storm clouds brewing outside of our windows, vendors coming along the aisle selling everything from the normative tea and snacks to Saris and bathing Gumpshas, along with most fruits and vegetables. When we finally left this snack-filled palace on wheels in Nabadwip the ominous clouds had become a full-fledged downpour, keeping us hopefully waiting on the overpass spanning the railroad tracks, enjoying a little Bengali banter with a couple particularly amicable fellows who I do believe may have been drunk at the time from the slight pungent twang of whiskey that hung in the air. My particularly favorite comment from the main talker of the two was the rather firm suggestion that I shave my stubble that I admit had grown out a bit too much because I would look much better without it – He pronounced that I would actually look quite nice in fact. However, the stubble had to go according to this fellow who then decided to (we believe) take it upon himself to teach us how to say 'I love you' repeatedly despite our patient yet confused nods. In a flurry of “I love you”s and “Amee tomake bhalobashi”s are friend departed us for his own train, curiously boarding the 'vendors' care without much on his person to vend.

A particularly soggy bike-rickshaw ride to the dock set the stage for my little disaster, all set within a particularly appropriate and all-too-cinematic scene. The dock was made of strapped together bamboo, a throng of people and bicycles pushing their way through 1.50 rupee ticket windows and onto slab-like boats without much more than a lip to keep one from an errant walk into the river, the clouds letting down a constant spray of rain, chunks of debris floating downriver. Somewhere between the ticket booth and about 15 feet off-shore my wallet had disappeared, either taken or dropped or both. A damper most definitely, luckily only leaving me short $60 and a comically jew-fro'ed ID card, rather than stranded in the middle of rural India without any way to pay my way. An advantage of traveling with friends. Though this definitely was a setback, and my own shower of “god damn it”s caused quite a bit of amusement amongst my fellow passengers.

Despite this setback I was determined to have myself a vacation, a respite from the chaos and crunch of Indian urban living, and with this sentiment we arrived at Mayapur, a cross between summer camp, an amusement park, and a temple complex, all of course shaped by a particularly western-centric Hinduism. Despite being a western organization, the entirety of the staff running this place were local Bengali's, as were the vast majority of the patrons and pilgrims of this temple complex. However, the occasional western Hare Krishna family – tiny children traipsing behind Dad on the way to morning prayers in miniature dhotis, little heads shaved save for a lock of often blond-ish hair in a kind of cross between pony-tail and rat-tail – never ceased to amuse as some kind of alternate reality of the American dream played out under the much less friendly Indian sun. In addition to more traditional-sounding prayers and chants, the occasional professionally written variation would emanate from the walls of the temple or along some pathway trailing one parade or another, its pop-sensibilities and sweet chord-progressions whispering reassuringly into my western ear.

It's like I had gone to a little – and albeit very very strange – slice of good ol' Amerika. However, this was an iteration of the homeland filled with hundreds upon hundreds of Bengali's outnumbering the glowingly white Westerners, replete with the tropical lushness of palm-tree groves, a rather shy elephant and the foreboding sky of a monsoon. Furthermore, things, Amerika things, while present were thrown akimbo, rearranged in ways unfamiliar and eerily 'wrong'. The morning prasadum booth – or 'blessed breakfast' stand if you will – sold in addition to a bevy of Indian sweets a kind of rectangular sheet pizza, its cheese unmelting paneer, its unyielding sponginess made yellow with turmeric. The tiny Western children would happily eat their regular morning pizza, their perhaps mid-western accents lending another hand in painting this bizarre picture of particularly strange looking pizza being consumed by small children in the early morning as the din of prayer bells and drums dies down, their parents standing by approvingly of what would normally be a last-ditch bachelor-style breakfast choice.

While there were a number of other strange quirks and characters to this place – particularly memorable being the British-Jamaican devotee whose gold-smeared forehead would crinkle is anguish as he described the 'militant' 'Chinese' 'operation' that he swore was attempting a progressive take-over of his guest-house – the strangest and most upsetting aspect of this place and its resident minority of ruling Westerners was the widespread lack of any local language skills whatsoever. Despite the fact that they were worshiping within a religion of Indian origin, sanctifying Bengali guru leaders, and employing and serving a primarily Bengali constituency, any moment I or my friend opened our mouths and our habitual slurry of Bengali and English came our rather than a clear-cut English we were met with the utmost of surprise, amusement, and of course curiosity by the locals. It became clear that very few of the western devotees had shown any desire to learn either Bengali or Hindi, preferring to remain linguistically distant from most of the religious congregation, in addition to the over-worked and most-definitely exploited help that were serving them. Those working the various services and functions of this religious funland would categorically develop these gleeful smiles after our speaking only a word or two of Bengali, usually going out of their way to help us with what we were after or simply being particularly nice, often obviously hoping that we would stick around for a little light banter. Comical chains would carry the news of our rather paltry linguistic abilities some distance, a small throng forming around one conversation or another, side comments (In Bengali) trumpeting our ability to speak into the near distance, coaxing a few more listeners out of the woodwork. One particularly funny instance was while buying a slice of 'fruit-cake' I was overheard explaining I did not have change by a passing family who immediately began to question me about that nature of my Bengali education. We soon were discussing our relative neighborhoods in Calcutta, the elderly fellow of the family repeatedly punctuating every sentence with a 'thank you', meant only for the fact that I was learning his language, complimenting his linguistic pride and identity in a way as authentic and great as possible. While people in Calcutta often have little enough constant exposure to westerners that they often speak to me in a Banglish without question, and may be mildly surprised when I have some understanding and reply, more often they are only relieved this particular transaction or communication will happen more smoothly than in instances with other foreigners in the past. However, here there was such a strong expectation against any language ability, built up by these unlearning foreign devotees, that the language provided a huge social lubricant, a way to access and interact with the people in this strange place in a way that was both exciting and rewarding. The look of glee, the repetitious conversations about our business here and the nature of our learning Bengali, never got old, each time filling me with a newfound sense of accomplishment, of purpose.

This was it: I had found proof in Mayapur that a year in Calcutta learning Bengali was going to be a good thing no matter what. Even if that pessimistic nag that I will never need Bengali ever again in my life turns out to be entirely true, I will have spent a year in a strange place, far from home, ripping myself out of familiar contexts and ideas, all-the-while able to actually access a people so different and foreign to myself in a way that few people really get to do while visiting a foreign country. Already I realize the cultural variation and detail that using this language to be here has allowed me to absorb, even though my speech is slow and jumbled, my understanding foggy and often largely guessed and contextualized. People open up that little bit more, sharing more through little quips, gestures and the nature of their conversational trajectories and head-wobbles than most books might provide. I'm now seeing this whole process as an investment, not just towards a possible and (I admit) highly improbable future, but more so in the here and now. Through this investment I am simply having a greater experience, more thick with cultural detail, more interesting and confusing and weird, more real and more experiential. I'm ok with the possibility of this having no purpose beyond this year itself, of working hours a day to gain competency in this relatively obscure language only for simple day to day rewards. Sob Thik Acche.

Week Four (Rural Pictoralism)

Week Four (Rural)

A sundry clutch of largely dilapidated villages and the grand opening of a department store. India is a place of drastic extremes, opposite poles pulling away from each other though intrinsically intertwined, leaving economic disparity, poverty, and contorted cultural norms in the wake of their conflict, and a fair amount of torn plastic bags lying on the side of the road. This past weekend we had our summer 'language camp' that seemed much more like a strange family vacation of a particular family that no forces, be they biological or social, would have normally ever constructed. Nevertheless, the lot of us - seven students and three teachers - awoke around four Friday morning and made our way through the slowly awakening streets of Kolkata to the train station, boarding a relatively posh 2nd class AC car of a train to Bishnupur, a town about five hours to the northwest of the city.

As soon as we cleared the slums and sprawl of Kolkata, a constant reminder of the less seen edges and faces of this city though well-recognized for its urban blight and poverty, the expanse of rice paddies extended in every direction towards the horizon, loose rectangles of varying shades of brown and green, from the neon of a freshly sprouting paddy to the steelish blue-brown of a paddy churned up by a recent plow. Dotting the landscape were the occasional yoke-tied oxen, crouching farmers, solitary bunches of palm trees, and a gently hobbling goat.

"At one point this was all jungle," said one of the other students with a look mixed with regret and disgust souring his expression, his relationship to this India tinged by a dozen years as a Hari Krishna, a former lifetime holed up in celibacy and ecstatic asceticism. This is however is a landscape of 'development', the much celebrated or criticized fact of what one might hope or hate is the world today. At times, development isn't issues of identity and sustainability, nationalism and globalism - it is an endless quilt of rice paddies stretching towards the horizon where once there might have been jungle, its crocheted surface the product and symbol of a burgeoning population exerting itself on its land.

"My mother tongue is English too," said the rather rotund man sitting across my row from me, a geology professor from some college of whose name I only caught a possible Christian nomenclature. He was a man who revealed himself to me to be both quite friendly and all too picky about his tea, often rejecting several cha-wallahs' (tea vendor) products served in tiny 2-3 ounce terra-cottas for being too dark/black (khalo) before gleefully being satisfied by one or another's murky white drink. This fellow also revealed himself to be the other half of a chortling pair of friends completed by one of the train conductors, also a quite friendly man for whom English was however not even a second-cousin-once-removed tongue. My fuzzy mind and morning-mouth made for some difficult Bengali conversation, a 'kobe' misheard as 'khabe', turning what had been a question of asking the date when he had visited America for his storied bank business trip into a both grammatically and socially friendly offer of my breakfast. He kindly declined, no harm done.

Bishnupur was like most Indian towns with an Archaeological Survey of India endorsed cachet of temples picked up off the ground and stacked up again with a bit of cement mortar, and its correlating trickle of tourism, primarily of Indian origin. The town lay stretched along a couple roads, the dimly lit phone-booths, sweet stores, and questionable internet-cafes in serial succession, men milling in front of dirty stoops, concrete always in a state of slight decomposition. Slightly outside the town were a series of spaced out but slightly-numbingly repetitive and long inactive Vishnavite temples of what was gleefully purported to be a distinctive terracotta construction, their backsides often having lost much of their decoration in sacrifice for a more uniformly adorned front.

On other days we went out farther a few hours by car, barely clearing the massive water-filled potholes increasing with the day's progress of the monsoon, seeing a teacher's childhood village, an adibashi village, and an extremely poor - though it escapes me if truly 'adibashi' village with a desired economy of terracotta handcrafts. To explain, 'adibashi' is a government designation, implying a population of 'aboriginal' people, an oft-debated racialization and perhaps concretization of poverty - the word literally translating to 'original inhabitant'. We weren't entirely sure why we went to these places, the people curious but unfamiliar enough with outsiders that timidity or disinterest kept away any real interaction, and a strong accent and dialect of Bengali prevented us from understanding or being understood. As we purposelessly walked through the dirt path that defined the village's central street, a small parade of children following in our wake or standing watch on an idle cart, the overwhelming atmosphere was that of an all too pictorial national-geographic poverty: children either mostly naked or wrapped in shockingly brightly colored clothing congregating in a sea of organic construction and decomposition, a backdrop of rough and crumbling browns and tans. This magnetic parade strung itself along to the nearby pond where on opposite sides of the pond two groups - one composed of slightly confused and sweaty Americans and their strangely content teachers, the other not even half their height and much more touchy with one another - engaged in the same exact activity of skipping stones while never actually interacting more than the occasionally crossing paths of their pebbles. An odd mirroring along an imaginary vertical line materialized to compliment those real reflections lying on the surface of this pond being dappled by friendly contests. A different kind of reality making itself quietly but consistently known.

The other day we went to this terracotta village, the mud here seemingly deeper and more invasive, this red mud making itself the overarching grammar of the village. the apparent center of the village was a no man's land of puddles, the houses replete with Bengali inscriptions begging godly mercy and exclaiming their own poverty. One after another, identical caricatured statues of horses and elephants lined almost every porch, trays of just produced limbs waiting to be assembled nearby, pieces of their unwanted fallen comrades slowly returning to the earth in small trash heaps. The monsoon unleashed itself again, the pathway became a stream and we stood under strangers' porch roofs for a while, wondering about our purpose, if any... if my 20 rupee purchase of a couple tiny horse figurines would make much of a difference.

While village life - often mixed with the sunny disposition childhood takes on in retrospective memory - is by city-dwellers celebrated in a deep and somber remorse for what they have lost, this is the flip side of India, or at least one of its many more murky and less seen undersides. The frantically happy stories of rural childhood, simple days spent eating fresh fruit from trees and milling about in ponds and underbrush, are replaced by more palpable and current visions of poverty and hard work, a vacuum of technology and convenience. Again, the open ended questions of development hung in the air made heavy with sheets of rain.

And then it was back to Kolkata. While of course there are other tales of this still amusingly named 'language camp', for the sake of brevity and thesis I'll avoid their description. The ride back was in the non-AC car, still a few notches above the lowest rung of Indian train travel, but much more crowded and with no obvious person of authority in place, its clientèle 'mixed' for lack of a better word, fewer English novels being read and professorships being proudly proclaimed. As I turned between my book and the slots of the thick nighttime that shown through the window bars, the phrase 'deepest darkest India' kept running through my mind. I was aware of both its orientalism and its material truth (it was quite dark out there) but feeling its gravity. This depth, this darkness, was the lop-sided development of the dense endlessness of India. While many receive phone calls anywhere in the countryside, and soda bottles pop up in almost every corner of the countryside, entire towns remain off the electrical grid and subsisting on shallow and insubstantial wells, becoming more and more distant from the rapidly changing urban population. However, instances of development and interconnection with larger networks of development bring mixed promise. Often illegal, over-polluting and dangerous small-scale coal mining operations have created employment and income for far-flung villages during the agriculturally nonsustaining winter-time, at the cost of human and ecological destruction and degradation. This is an implication of development, sooty clouds pock-marking the sky above this boundless rice-paddied countryside. My pondering was interrupted by an odd series of altercations happening in quick succession down the aisle of the train. A hijra was accosting men rather violently, moving directly into their seat aisles, waving his/her money in a fan with his/her left hand, pushing them about with his/her right while the men tried hard to avoid any eye contact long enough for him/her to leave them alone. Oh, ok... like I said, there was no obvious authority aboard this train.

A day after returning, I went to a department store still in its grand-opening week in search of brown rice to address more personal and nutritional needs. Middle class Bengalis and one other foreigner milled among the aisles, Indian staples such as daal and oil in neatly ordered rows, complimented by such far-flung items as imported peanut-butter and canned corn. Supermarket musak interspersed with sales announcements of what were to me mysterious products and brands floated above our heads, an army of employees and guards idling in the aisles, usually getting in the way but occasionally straightening a row or helping an elderly man get his bag of over-inspected atta or moong. These shopping centers have begun to pop up throughout the city, a celebration and slightly nauseous product of India's new middle class, a bizarre blend of commodity and context, over-packaged products lined up in a shiny over air-conditioned palace of shopping, its doors bookended by guards dressed in outfits fit for the British Raj of the late 19th century. Their outfits always involve jodpurs, handle-bar mustaches, and turban-like hats with loft feathers. I saw the faults of the American consuming population abounding halfway across the world - overuse of shipping and packaging, fetishization of the foreign or popularized 'convenience' - and my knee-jerk criticism of this emerging fact of modern India mingled with the tinkly music from the sound system.

"They want to keep us backward and poor." I remembered these words being uttered by the son of the family from whom I am renting my room, thoughts concerning those people resisting these kinds of transformations of economy and polity. He is a middle-class college art student, with both a bodily demeanor and size, atypical among Indians, especially his his head of long uncoiffed hair, a human product of this development. My aversion to Walmart and its derivatives and derrogatypes was thrown into opposition with a more personally emotional and practical stance on this issue of development.

Like I had started off this little diatribe, India, really seems to be this place of strong oppositions not just placed in contrast and juxtaposition but tied together through causation and negation. I don't know exactly the implications of these symbols and snapshots of development - the emerald expanse of rice-paddies, the soot drifting off a creaking coal works, the dirt-smeared declarations of poverty on door-posts, the milling air-conditioned middle-class looking through packages of beans and Ramen noodles with a discerning eye - but I do know that they all definitely do mean something and that there is a dissonant yet codependent origination of it all.

By the way, still missing Amerika, even though I did splurge and buy a jar of peanut butter imported from Illinois.