July 30, 2008
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?
July 27, 2008
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.
July 20, 2008
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.
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.
July 16, 2008
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.
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.
July 7, 2008
Week Three (Mentality)
Having now been here for three weeks, a time that subjectively has felt much more akin to an eternity, I'm coming to some kind of psychological compromise with this place. Quite possibly, over the course of this year I won't really find anyone I can really relate to, and save for the couple of other people who will be here for the year, in addition to a fiance of one, might not really come to really know anyone in this city. I'll still continue to get out, looking for inlets through art, academia, and (still, hopefully) ngo work, but I think in a strange way I'm becoming receptive to the idea of a relatively quiet year, visiting and receiving the occasional friend living elsewhere in northern India (at least there will be a handful of these starting in the fall) and spending a lot of time living simply, learning a language and paying attention to existing, sometimes interpreting my surroundings and sometimes letting their cacophony numb me into mere reception rather than analytical interpretation. Wandering through the Maidan yesterday, the central park that is much more wild, twisty, and vacant than the equivalent in New York City, I realized I was really contented. This funny sort of middle-ground of emotionality - contentment - has been popping up lately between constant horn-honking, packs of howling street dogs, and the whooping calls of trash-pickers and broom sellers.
Last night I heard a stick thumping the ground in a classic sort of rhythm I hadn't hear since I had left Chandigarh - the call of a herdsman to his cows/buffalo (I'm still not sure what to call them). Kolkata has banned cows from the majority of the city proper, pushing any herds out to the most peripheral suburbs, so the classic Indian cow rarely makes an appearance around these parts. However, upon hearing the regular strikes of this lathi stick I went out to my terrace and saw a massive cow standing alone in the intersection by my house, not really heeding to his master's call and instead preferring to strut forward slowly, moving its head from side to side, not really seeming to care about its unexpectedness, its misplaced context. And while this is surely a cheesy comparison to draw, this mentality seemed to be like that which I had been experiencing in pockets as of late: A contentedness to exist errant to the surrounding culture and its expectations, out of place but uncaring about such stark difference. The rude calls from primarily teenage boys in packs effect me less and less while the moments of kindness from strangers and acquaintances, like the civility and simple friendliness that has been developing between myself and people like my sobji wallah and dudh (milk) wallah, the funny conversations with strangers in doctor's waiting rooms and smelly subway cars, leave a much stronger psychological impression. I'm ok - albeit just ok - but for lack of a better word, I'm ok with being ok.
I definitely miss the hubbub of Manhattan, the eloquent grunge and amazing conviviality of Brooklyn, the comforting rhythms of Philadelphia. I miss the US in a lot of ways, its multiple trajectories of modernity all clashing and fighting their way forward creating a stupendous, brusque, and occasionally banal culture in its wake, its political and personal openness. I miss being relatively close to my family and surrounded by a pretty amazing circle of friends stretched across two cities. I miss being able to be myself rather than a symbol of the West given little leeway to actually exist as myself, particularly in terms of sexuality and political conviction. But, at one point or another I've started to arrive at a point of being ok with these missing pieces and the possibility of not really regaining them or finding things to take their place for a year, stripping my life back to an at times essentialist, at times more minimalist state. I'm ok with that.
At least this is how I feel on these nice cloudy afternoons where I can take a nap without sweating and think about eating a warm kathi roll and maybe another odd and yet all eerily similar milk-based sweet-squishiness from the mishti dokan (sweet shop) in between leisurely doing grammar exercises and memorizing new vocabulary. Sob theek achchhe. (Everything is ok).
Last night I heard a stick thumping the ground in a classic sort of rhythm I hadn't hear since I had left Chandigarh - the call of a herdsman to his cows/buffalo (I'm still not sure what to call them). Kolkata has banned cows from the majority of the city proper, pushing any herds out to the most peripheral suburbs, so the classic Indian cow rarely makes an appearance around these parts. However, upon hearing the regular strikes of this lathi stick I went out to my terrace and saw a massive cow standing alone in the intersection by my house, not really heeding to his master's call and instead preferring to strut forward slowly, moving its head from side to side, not really seeming to care about its unexpectedness, its misplaced context. And while this is surely a cheesy comparison to draw, this mentality seemed to be like that which I had been experiencing in pockets as of late: A contentedness to exist errant to the surrounding culture and its expectations, out of place but uncaring about such stark difference. The rude calls from primarily teenage boys in packs effect me less and less while the moments of kindness from strangers and acquaintances, like the civility and simple friendliness that has been developing between myself and people like my sobji wallah and dudh (milk) wallah, the funny conversations with strangers in doctor's waiting rooms and smelly subway cars, leave a much stronger psychological impression. I'm ok - albeit just ok - but for lack of a better word, I'm ok with being ok.
I definitely miss the hubbub of Manhattan, the eloquent grunge and amazing conviviality of Brooklyn, the comforting rhythms of Philadelphia. I miss the US in a lot of ways, its multiple trajectories of modernity all clashing and fighting their way forward creating a stupendous, brusque, and occasionally banal culture in its wake, its political and personal openness. I miss being relatively close to my family and surrounded by a pretty amazing circle of friends stretched across two cities. I miss being able to be myself rather than a symbol of the West given little leeway to actually exist as myself, particularly in terms of sexuality and political conviction. But, at one point or another I've started to arrive at a point of being ok with these missing pieces and the possibility of not really regaining them or finding things to take their place for a year, stripping my life back to an at times essentialist, at times more minimalist state. I'm ok with that.
At least this is how I feel on these nice cloudy afternoons where I can take a nap without sweating and think about eating a warm kathi roll and maybe another odd and yet all eerily similar milk-based sweet-squishiness from the mishti dokan (sweet shop) in between leisurely doing grammar exercises and memorizing new vocabulary. Sob theek achchhe. (Everything is ok).
Week Three (Pictures)
The view out of my window. While my room looks dark it actually gets a lot of light and is pretty large and square, a little bit of space to call my own in this squishilly suffocating city.
The building outside of this window, replete with crow. In Kolkata there are pretty much no birds besides crows, and they survive because they eat everyone's trash. They also make thumping noises on my veranda and wake me up in the morning. Since when do birds thump? Apparently, that's how things work in Kolkata.
Standing on my veranda you see the other buildings in my neighborhood. Everyone leaves their doors open so I catch glimpses of people eating dinner very often. These dinners are often highly unromantic candle-lit affairs due to constant evening time power outages ie. load shedding.
In the evenings and around lunch time the sobji owallah (vegetable guy) sells a large amount of familiar and mysterious vegetables. The two sons (I think) of the head owallah think we're pretty funny foreigners but are actually quite nice, helping us out and never gouging. They're also there in the morning, joined by a phul owallah (fruit guy) who rarely has ripe bananas, but he's always there even if its pouring, so at least he's dependable. Also, even if he has no bananas he always has mangoes and guavas, the latter being a fruit that after a while I've come to strangely actually like eating.
In India, verandas are key, though because Bangla has no 'v' letter, one might be inclined to call them berandas, maybe...
My institute, a classy affair most definitely. In this picture there is also a hand rickshaw owallah, a point of contention here. While bike rickshaws were made illegal and replaced by autos (think of a motorcycle with a box built onto it so you end up with a wee three-wheel car) these rickshaws, despite being heavily criticized as a symbol of Kolkata's huge disparity in socio-economic standing and an instrument of human abuse at the hands of economic demand and a difficult job market, have persisted. Practically, they actually remain one of the few ways to get transported through monsoon-time waterlogged streets that like mine end up with a foot or two (at least) of water making the road impossible or at least highly difficult to navigate through any other means besides these rickshaws or an incredibly slow kind of gliding walk that I picked up the first bad rain. The key is moving your foot primarily horizontally at all times so water glides through flip flops rather than tearing them off and maintaining one's upright center of gravity upon encountering sudden dips under dark and murky waters. This is an excuse for looking feeble and kind of stupid while trudging through the river-y street.
Another shot of the building which houses the institute, on its 2nd and 3rd floors. you can see the sludge line on the wall from past flooding and also just the constant grime-goo that ends up on everything here. The writing on the wall reads "Briged Cholun". While "Cholun" is a polite way of saying "You should go" I have absolutely no idea what "Briged" means... probably some store of things, probably things I have no desire to own.
This is the actual entrance to the building. It is just darling. The cabs here all have this old-timey thing going on, though I rarely take them due to the hassle of having to haggle and make sure he's not taking you on a circuitous route if you're going by the meter, and even if you make it fair they're still slower and way more expensive than going by foot/rickshaw/subway. Yes, there is a subway here which is actually kind of nice, though it closes pretty early at night, has only one line running north/south, and is one of the smelliest and most crowded subways I've ever been on, even worse than Delhi. Though I feel that taking public transportation here as a bideshi (foreigner, and the word that first comes to mind nowadays when considering my relative identity) gives me a bit of street cred. Or so I can hope.
The 'lounge' in the institute, one of my most favorite rooms I've ever encountered. Despite the fact that puddles of water snake their way across the floor with the least bit of rain and there's a constant din of honking and yelling from outside there's definitely a regal colonialist flair to it that I really enjoy quite a bit. This is a good place to enjoy one's daily daal-bhat (lentils and rice along with whatever else you're eating at lunchtime).
There is a pretty massive park in central Kolkata, and after dealing with a subway ride and a few minutes navigating along the street that forms the primary tourist hub of the city, and thus its ensuing hawkers, it is actually kind of amazing. The oppressive noise of the city slowly ebbs into a murmur. There is a lot of empty space and dirt paths winding around creaky old cricket stadiums and 'sports clubs'. There is also a big field where the primary activity seems to be pasturing horses. I haven't seen horses until I went here, so who knows what they're used for in this city.
While I didn't go inside this here is one of the more famous buildings in the city, the Victoria Memorial, a symbol of the British Raj now kept up as a museum that at least in part is meant to convey the hardships of Indian life under Colonial control. One day I'll go when I'm feeling more like a couple hours of historical wanderings, but the 150 rs. foreigner admission price, especially in contrast to the 10 rs. Indian citizen ticket, was a turn of. This disparity of pricing poses a problem with seeing anything of historical/sight-seeing value here, especially if being paid a stipend that while geared towards funding an upper-end Indian lifestyle, is still meant to provide for a relatively Indian rather than American budget.
This man passed me on a pathway somewhere in the South-Western portion of the park, despite his number of tins. Though, I was walking slowly at this point, trying to learn how not to sweat in the humidity here (It may be possible to learn this as a skill, yes?). He just had so many tins, an aspect that made me want a picture incredibly. I was thinking about asking about taking his picture, but while knowing the words for "can I", "your", and "picture" I had no idea if the appropriate verb would be "take". If there is anything I've learned in this language program is that these kind of verbs are highly idiomatic and vary incredibly from language to language. For example, in Bengali, one's eats both a cigarette and a kiss, and eating up becomes eating take. And so on...
This is a memorial for something.... probably army related due to its closeness to the military base quaintly placed right next to the central city park. I just enjoy the odd soviet-futurist aspect that many of these things take on here.
This was only one of the more emotional statues that are built up throughout the park without rhyme or reason, frequently surrounded by weeds or fetid waters. While taking the picture a dog scampered out of the odd pen-like fencing. He was rather cute and had a demeanor that suggested he had done something wrong and was not proud of it. I do not know what he was thinking at the time
After becoming fairly lost within a pocket of the city that was constituted primarily of giant banking buildings and an inordinate amount of street food (not bad, despite a banana owallah who tried to rip me off hilariously, to the point where even he couldn't keep a straight face. He did not succeed, by the way) I finally found the bank of the Hoogly, a river that is somehow connected to the Ganges and therefore has the whole ghat/bathing thing going for it. However, like all rivers running through cities in India, it was quite foul and fairly inaccessible due to fences, crowds of people bathing within the confines of confusingly purposed arch-ish structures, the Flotel (a floating hotel! To think of the pleasures it might provide!) and several dozen poojah buses lined up to take people to what appeared to be every city in this country. However, the stillness was kind of novel for this city and the tugboats were pretty cheerful.
There were a number of these old-style row boats going up and down the river, an interjection of traditional technology and a totally different pace in a city that seems to be so desperately trying to escape these old methods and objects. But, despite the city's ballooning size and conscious disregard of so many old mores, the huge economic variation keeps things like these boats a constant feature of this city, making an odd mish-mash of centuries of different technologies, bound to a class system.
Week Three (A Medical Adventure of Sorts)
As mentioned in a 'preview' a few days ago, for those of you who are reading regularly (and despite the lack of comments I do in fact know that at least some of you are, or at least this is what I tell myself to ward of the threat of psychological and social isolation) I got a case of mysterious sick after my first couple weeks here. It started with a persistent fever, a lot of gooey nose business, and a headache that would swish around my head whenever I moved, which for that period of time at least I did rather infrequently. Most mysterious however, was a blotchy itchy redness that started in the corners of my mouth and then without seeming reason or pattern would appear elsewhere, a spread of something strange and alien traveling and setting shop in any nook or cranny it took a fancy to, unlike any dermatological condition I've enjoyed while stateside or frankly anywhere. This, in the land of mysterious viscous substances, monsoon puddles that cover entire streets and end up knee high and furnished by floating diapers and who knows what, and a constant forced-sharing of every space and surface with unknown thousands of others all of their own unique hygienic states, is a tad bit worrisome. The mystery! The intrigue! The constant muttered hopes of reassurance that I did not in fact have some subcontinental herpes.
So, while every other ailment and issue seemed to dissipate in its own good time, after a few days of incredibly bored sweating performed in an often powerless apartment, the rash remained and continued to wander. The mystery expanded not only along the surface of my skin but also within my mind, an all consuming nag of possible consequences and outcomes and a constant recounting of places I had been and more importantly things or people I may have touched.
Then, I went to the doctor, an adventure in and of itself.
The Indian medical system and social society is quite a different experience from our US/American standards of things. For one thing, formal records, appointments, and all those rules of order that seem to bother so often don't exist here, leading to a jumbled room of patients waiting to be called by first name, last name, or frankly anything and pointed into dimly lit irregular rooms (I was just entitled 'you' while there, my status as a foreigner requiring no further identification or categorization). There exists a certain social-club-esque atmosphere in the waiting room, strangers asking each other openly and directly why they were there... 'normal check-up? evaluation? consultation?', something that just strikes me as a bit odd. I, as the lone foreigner in the room was asked quite a few times why I was there. I didn't feel much like sharing so each time I would say that I was here to see the doctor. An obvious reply, yes, but a seemingly satisfactory answer for a relatively invasive question.
I then saw the doctor. The doctors here do not wear gloves, or have nice sheets of removable trace-paper covering their examining tables. They also don't touch you or ask you personal questions (oddly less personal than those questions hosted in the waiting room on the other side of the dingy wall). This doctor was not particularly helpful, pretty much saying I could have anything in the world but not seeming too alarmed by that. So, I gave some blood and some urine for them to take a peek at, which also was its own special set of experiences. While I watched carefully to make sure the needle being inserted in my arm was new and clean, not much else was. The party atmosphere of the blood-test room, with a group of patients waiting to be tested all sort of huddled around whoever was letting blood at the moment in one small room, was a bit odd. The urine sample tray was also seemingly proudly displayed on a stool near the center of the waiting room, like some kind of multi-shaded opulent display of glowing pieces de'art, each one's unique composition lending a particular new hue and opacity and perhaps simultaneously a new way to consider one's own reflection warped and held within the convex plastic. A commentary of self-portraiture, personal versus collective identity, the dialectic between oneself and the group? I do not know but any variety of analyses could be suitable. Beauty and Ideology! I left unresolved and equally worried about whatever new bits or diseases I may have picked up while there.
This is coming across as quite bitter and demeaning, but I was concerned, yes?
Rather than seeing what seemed to be a Bengali-only speaking clinic of a skin doctor recommended by the doctor, I went to see a guy I picked myself, a contact of the Institute here and a guy with a pretty strong hold over the English language and a rather reputable series of credentials. The waiting room was akin to a cozy cave, the cadre of a dozen or so patients stooped beneath furiously desperate fans, requisitely shoeless (a rather quaintly Indian aspect of hospitals and clinic waiting rooms here). After a pleasant conversation with a college English major whose own English language abilities were not particularly good but and was simultaneously highly amused by my Bengali pronunciation, along with my vegetarianism and my lack of any smoking habit, I saw the doctor and was almost immediately diagnosed with scabies.
'Scabies'... a word not usually received with the utmost of joy. But here, with the huge range of possible afflictions, it was a godsend: A handful of bugs I could rid myself of with a couple pills that simultaneously would do away with any worms I might have picked up (on the side, just in case) rather than some flesh-eating virus passed along by shared auto-rickshaws or the errant whack of elbows in the street. 'Scabies!' I thought to myself as I happily walked home, a threatening monsoon cloud cooling things to the point of being downright pleasant, a guava in hand, dusted in some red and mildly spicy salt (their choice, not mine) and a gulab jamun and a couple other strange globs of milk-sweets in my other. 'Scabies! Just scabies!" was all I could think as I happily wove myself through people and speeding buses and cars careening towards the sidewalk. “Haha, oh scabies...”
'What a wonderful evening to be walking along in Kolkata! The City of Joy... Scabies!"
So, while every other ailment and issue seemed to dissipate in its own good time, after a few days of incredibly bored sweating performed in an often powerless apartment, the rash remained and continued to wander. The mystery expanded not only along the surface of my skin but also within my mind, an all consuming nag of possible consequences and outcomes and a constant recounting of places I had been and more importantly things or people I may have touched.
Then, I went to the doctor, an adventure in and of itself.
The Indian medical system and social society is quite a different experience from our US/American standards of things. For one thing, formal records, appointments, and all those rules of order that seem to bother so often don't exist here, leading to a jumbled room of patients waiting to be called by first name, last name, or frankly anything and pointed into dimly lit irregular rooms (I was just entitled 'you' while there, my status as a foreigner requiring no further identification or categorization). There exists a certain social-club-esque atmosphere in the waiting room, strangers asking each other openly and directly why they were there... 'normal check-up? evaluation? consultation?', something that just strikes me as a bit odd. I, as the lone foreigner in the room was asked quite a few times why I was there. I didn't feel much like sharing so each time I would say that I was here to see the doctor. An obvious reply, yes, but a seemingly satisfactory answer for a relatively invasive question.
I then saw the doctor. The doctors here do not wear gloves, or have nice sheets of removable trace-paper covering their examining tables. They also don't touch you or ask you personal questions (oddly less personal than those questions hosted in the waiting room on the other side of the dingy wall). This doctor was not particularly helpful, pretty much saying I could have anything in the world but not seeming too alarmed by that. So, I gave some blood and some urine for them to take a peek at, which also was its own special set of experiences. While I watched carefully to make sure the needle being inserted in my arm was new and clean, not much else was. The party atmosphere of the blood-test room, with a group of patients waiting to be tested all sort of huddled around whoever was letting blood at the moment in one small room, was a bit odd. The urine sample tray was also seemingly proudly displayed on a stool near the center of the waiting room, like some kind of multi-shaded opulent display of glowing pieces de'art, each one's unique composition lending a particular new hue and opacity and perhaps simultaneously a new way to consider one's own reflection warped and held within the convex plastic. A commentary of self-portraiture, personal versus collective identity, the dialectic between oneself and the group? I do not know but any variety of analyses could be suitable. Beauty and Ideology! I left unresolved and equally worried about whatever new bits or diseases I may have picked up while there.
This is coming across as quite bitter and demeaning, but I was concerned, yes?
Rather than seeing what seemed to be a Bengali-only speaking clinic of a skin doctor recommended by the doctor, I went to see a guy I picked myself, a contact of the Institute here and a guy with a pretty strong hold over the English language and a rather reputable series of credentials. The waiting room was akin to a cozy cave, the cadre of a dozen or so patients stooped beneath furiously desperate fans, requisitely shoeless (a rather quaintly Indian aspect of hospitals and clinic waiting rooms here). After a pleasant conversation with a college English major whose own English language abilities were not particularly good but and was simultaneously highly amused by my Bengali pronunciation, along with my vegetarianism and my lack of any smoking habit, I saw the doctor and was almost immediately diagnosed with scabies.
'Scabies'... a word not usually received with the utmost of joy. But here, with the huge range of possible afflictions, it was a godsend: A handful of bugs I could rid myself of with a couple pills that simultaneously would do away with any worms I might have picked up (on the side, just in case) rather than some flesh-eating virus passed along by shared auto-rickshaws or the errant whack of elbows in the street. 'Scabies!' I thought to myself as I happily walked home, a threatening monsoon cloud cooling things to the point of being downright pleasant, a guava in hand, dusted in some red and mildly spicy salt (their choice, not mine) and a gulab jamun and a couple other strange globs of milk-sweets in my other. 'Scabies! Just scabies!" was all I could think as I happily wove myself through people and speeding buses and cars careening towards the sidewalk. “Haha, oh scabies...”
'What a wonderful evening to be walking along in Kolkata! The City of Joy... Scabies!"
July 2, 2008
Week Two Addendum (Sidewalks)
Something I think about almost every new (or sometimes familiar) place I go, is this idea of sidewalks as the infrastructure of democracy, a cement proof and simultaneous breeding ground of a place's civic political sphere. There is the possibility of ubiquity or scarcity and an oddly inexhaustible range of variety of this piece of the built environment, often overlooked for its seeming banality, but reading a society through its sidewalks, through the way this 'democracy' is played out, is pretty interesting.
The sidewalks of Manhattan, particularly those flanking the avenues and busy thoroughfares, are wide enough to allow a huge amount of mobility even when encroached upon by capitalist set-ups, be they the rows of chairs and tables set up for the sake of dining amidst the hoots and hollers of the street or the creaky beggar shaking a coffee cup of change and smelling a bit off. Meanwhile, developments are often built without sidewalks, completely eliminating this facet of human mobility and its social connotations, its accessibility an therefore certain aspects of its market identity . Just as often, entire developments are built with gleaming white sidewalks replete with sloped wheelchair access points placed regularly... but leading to nothing beyond their welcome signs boasting arboreal fantasies at their entrances. Occasionally a dirt path beaten into the grass continues on along the highway, staked out by those who often lie outside of this community either literally or socio-economically, and thusly have a use and a mobility separate from this sidewalk infrastructure. But tall of these ideas of footpaths and sidewalks have been a bit challenged and confused by how things seem to work here.
In Kolkata, the sidewalks are a mess, never wide enough, never paved smoothly, a mishmash of different shaped bricks, mounds of dirt, gravel, trash, and of course an all too occasional pit of murky gray water and its mysterious lurking bits and pieces. The sidewalk vendors are not neatly set off to one side leaving the other free for traffic. Rather, they set up along both sides, their tarps strung overhead in a canopy of ropes and faded plastics hung at a height that often requires someone of an average (US) height to crouch or at least dart and wobble an umbrella, avoiding hanging dupatas and lion-king themed towels and of course the heads and umbrellas of everyone else. Those shopping at any of these stalls must stop, or at least choose to stop, directly within the middle of the sidewalk, creating ubiquitous snarls and blockages within a sidewalk now reduced to a meter or so wide. Thusly, many people (myself included) take to walking in the street, winding through cars and rickshaws, avoiding the careening bus and suddenly opened door or onrush of traffic emanating from a changed light.
So, if a city's politics and civic identity can be determined, at least in part, by the physical and programmatic states of the sidewalk, what does this nearly unusable but simultaneously overused sidewalk imply? Especially considering this within a country that proudly calls itself the largest democracy in the world and in a city with so strong a communist and labor-rights political identity that city-wide work-stoppages occur regularly to show camaraderie of cause, what does this mean?
Taking this idea of defining 'democratic' identity through sidewalks in isolation, creating an obviously narrow definition for the sake of argument, one can venture that despite the communist undertones of this city, the programs of the sidewalks, especially in that sales and haggling displace the general coming and going population, are in fact a testament to the highly capitalist nature of democracy at least on this microcosmic level in India. In other words, the democratic identity is highly defined by a kind of hyper-commodified capitalism where goods and their constant sale displace all other aspects of civil society. Production and sale often become one, the worker forming his goods as something to bide time while he waits for his next sale, a surplus of goods growing around him. I don't remember where I heard or read the idea of haggling as a form of actually quite amicable and desired - and required - social interaction, but this idea also seems to apply... the sidewalk's normal banter hugely subsisting of a kind of socialization fueled and formed by commodities and capitalism. The democracy of this place, at least so far as it can be read by its sidewalks (a statement whose absurdity I realize) is defined by a manic hyper-capitalism that seems to lack any controls beyond its own hive-mind of individual capitalist drive. While obviously democracy in virtually all existing forms can be claimed capitalist in nature, the degree to which this infrastructural element of democracy has been literally overrun by capitalism is perhaps an indicator of a democracy that has become to focused on its capitalist manifestation and quickly losing all other components of its political, civic, and social spheres.
And this whole diatribe came out of being frustrated by walking to school in the rain and dealing with crowded sidewalks and muddy puddles whose contents continue to frighten a bit. You will have to excuse me.
The sidewalks of Manhattan, particularly those flanking the avenues and busy thoroughfares, are wide enough to allow a huge amount of mobility even when encroached upon by capitalist set-ups, be they the rows of chairs and tables set up for the sake of dining amidst the hoots and hollers of the street or the creaky beggar shaking a coffee cup of change and smelling a bit off. Meanwhile, developments are often built without sidewalks, completely eliminating this facet of human mobility and its social connotations, its accessibility an therefore certain aspects of its market identity . Just as often, entire developments are built with gleaming white sidewalks replete with sloped wheelchair access points placed regularly... but leading to nothing beyond their welcome signs boasting arboreal fantasies at their entrances. Occasionally a dirt path beaten into the grass continues on along the highway, staked out by those who often lie outside of this community either literally or socio-economically, and thusly have a use and a mobility separate from this sidewalk infrastructure. But tall of these ideas of footpaths and sidewalks have been a bit challenged and confused by how things seem to work here.
In Kolkata, the sidewalks are a mess, never wide enough, never paved smoothly, a mishmash of different shaped bricks, mounds of dirt, gravel, trash, and of course an all too occasional pit of murky gray water and its mysterious lurking bits and pieces. The sidewalk vendors are not neatly set off to one side leaving the other free for traffic. Rather, they set up along both sides, their tarps strung overhead in a canopy of ropes and faded plastics hung at a height that often requires someone of an average (US) height to crouch or at least dart and wobble an umbrella, avoiding hanging dupatas and lion-king themed towels and of course the heads and umbrellas of everyone else. Those shopping at any of these stalls must stop, or at least choose to stop, directly within the middle of the sidewalk, creating ubiquitous snarls and blockages within a sidewalk now reduced to a meter or so wide. Thusly, many people (myself included) take to walking in the street, winding through cars and rickshaws, avoiding the careening bus and suddenly opened door or onrush of traffic emanating from a changed light.
So, if a city's politics and civic identity can be determined, at least in part, by the physical and programmatic states of the sidewalk, what does this nearly unusable but simultaneously overused sidewalk imply? Especially considering this within a country that proudly calls itself the largest democracy in the world and in a city with so strong a communist and labor-rights political identity that city-wide work-stoppages occur regularly to show camaraderie of cause, what does this mean?
Taking this idea of defining 'democratic' identity through sidewalks in isolation, creating an obviously narrow definition for the sake of argument, one can venture that despite the communist undertones of this city, the programs of the sidewalks, especially in that sales and haggling displace the general coming and going population, are in fact a testament to the highly capitalist nature of democracy at least on this microcosmic level in India. In other words, the democratic identity is highly defined by a kind of hyper-commodified capitalism where goods and their constant sale displace all other aspects of civil society. Production and sale often become one, the worker forming his goods as something to bide time while he waits for his next sale, a surplus of goods growing around him. I don't remember where I heard or read the idea of haggling as a form of actually quite amicable and desired - and required - social interaction, but this idea also seems to apply... the sidewalk's normal banter hugely subsisting of a kind of socialization fueled and formed by commodities and capitalism. The democracy of this place, at least so far as it can be read by its sidewalks (a statement whose absurdity I realize) is defined by a manic hyper-capitalism that seems to lack any controls beyond its own hive-mind of individual capitalist drive. While obviously democracy in virtually all existing forms can be claimed capitalist in nature, the degree to which this infrastructural element of democracy has been literally overrun by capitalism is perhaps an indicator of a democracy that has become to focused on its capitalist manifestation and quickly losing all other components of its political, civic, and social spheres.
And this whole diatribe came out of being frustrated by walking to school in the rain and dealing with crowded sidewalks and muddy puddles whose contents continue to frighten a bit. You will have to excuse me.
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