It's hard to stay motivated,

...to continue to apply for jobs when the only responses I get or silence or rejection steeped in the dismal outlook set by 'today's economy'.

...to do much of anything productive when it gets hot before breakfast and the stuffy stickiness remains long past dinnertime.

...to not feel isolated from anything and anyone having to do with your field, separated by a half-day's time difference, a major body of water or two, and a lack of internet past 6pm or so. ...to care about much of anything between 10am and 7pm, ie. daylight hours.

It's easy to complain,

...to eat various fried foods prepared by a shirtless man stooped over kerosene fryer on the sidewalk. ...to take naps and then eat bread mindlessly while still sweaty and confused over dreams involving past or contrived lovers.

...to sit on my veranda, pretending to not watch my neighbors across the street eat their dinners but actually playing a game consisting of guessing what concoction lies in each bowl, mustard oil pooling in a sickly vermilion on the surface.

...to give up on identifying what breeds of mosquitoes and other bugs might be biting me at night, leaving me with a sundry grab-bag of welts and lumps of all different sizes, colors, aggravations, and lifespans.

In sum, it's hard to apply for and find jobs, while it's easy to eat or do other food related activities.I suppose, despite being overseas, this all makes me your average Amerikan.

PATRIOTISM!

(unrelated: i miss grapefruit)

Time has passed

It's been a while.

I am coming up on month ten of the subcontinental residency. My apartment lease ends in 40 days. I will be back in the Amerika in just under 2 months. Everything exists only as countdowns and running timers, moving backwards and forwards from the present. Whenever I am asked what country I am from (and this happens constantly, everywhere, incessantly, without restraint) the next question is undoubtedly how long I have been here, how long I will stay. An assumed (albeit correct) temporariness...

In the last few months I have been to Thailand, Cambodia, Israel, and Turkey, short breaks from the stifling shuffle and terracotta teas of Kolkata. It's oddly strange to realize one's reference point has been relocated, for boarding passes to mention destinations and hometown returns devoid of any mention of JFK or Newark. This is also a point of strong suspicion for airline personnel working along any Israeli routes – I was stopped and questioned a record number of times. Though I admit that my bag filled with jars of tahina on the return trip would look a bit funny through the monitor of the x-ray machine, and the unkempt facial hair and gumpcha-as-scarf didn't help.

The last month or so has reinstated the summer heat back into our lives, the midday sun making the outside world incredibly uninviting, and of course adding a new dimension and acridity to smells wafting out of street gutters and garbage piles, and also from the armpits of those less drawn towards personal hygiene, perhaps due to economic circumstance but often just as point of personal preference or rather... ambivalence.

Speaking of garbage piles, one of my favorite sights here involves a particularly wonderful yet common occurrence that take place in and around the pile at the corner from my building. Oftentimes, when returning late at night I spot a poetically archetypal cow (black and white spots, lacking the particular angularity of the more brown and bullish creature more often seen here) munching on some household debris, a street dog or two happily shoveling down several-day old rice stained sickly yellow with the remnants of a past daal, and a near-albino cat timidly nibbling away on its own favored fragments, often nestled at the cows feet. It just seems the strangest dinner party one might imagine, as if a number of foreign dignitaries got together without translators, decided to remove their trousers and stand knee deep in whatever it was they were eating, and occasionally stare suspiciously at any passerbys. In the dark of night, on a deserted street corner reeking of piss, with their coiffures gone akimbo.

Normal

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

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

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

Bombs over Bombay

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

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

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

WW (Wacky Whities) Strike Again

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

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

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

Temp

1. A temporary temporality

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

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

2. Again sick

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

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

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

Weather! Scarfs!

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

Politics (US Election in Indialand)

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

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

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

Varanasi

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

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

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

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