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.