April 3
Today I am in love with India. Right now, if I were to encounter some kind of opportunity to come back here to Delhi to live indefinitely, I might just do it. India is vast and deep, horrible and beautiful, and Delhi captures a huge amount of it all, I think. I must remind myself that I have not yet been to India's two other largest cities, Chennai (Madras) and Kolkata (Calcutta), both of which I hear nothing but wonderful things about. It is in Delhi, though, more than in any other place so far, that I can feel the vastness of India. It is this city that aspires to represent, to tie together more than a billion people. Every part of India comes together here. I step out of an internet cafe into a crowd of Tibetan Buddhist monks floating by. I pass a music shop blasting Indian hip hop for a big white cow who has parked himself in front of the door, perhaps to extort a carrot or cookie in exchange for moving aside (this is a well known Hindu cow tactic). A huge white bus with "LORD JESUS" painted in huge italicized letters barrels down on three young Punjabi boys tightly fit on a a single motorcycle careening down the street. The Parliament building is grand and domed, much like the U.S. Capitol building, except it is dark and brownish, and with more parts set wider apart. Multiple domes. Stretching before it are vast reflecting pools in which naked children and whole families wash themselves. And then a minute away is Khan Market, where a strikingly cosmopolitan crowd peruses magazines about every slice of Indian life displayed next to The New Yorker, and even OUT Magazine, before checking out fancy kurtas and saris at Fab India. And there are monkeys here!
Delhi is getting expensive for me, so I decided to abandon autorickshaws (which cost about $1 a ride) for the real deal -- Delhi's public buses. Buses in India are a wild ride, as I may have mentioned before. Traffic in general is super wild. It would take a lot of bike riding through Times Square or someplace equally chaotic to match the adrenaline rush one gets from participating in Indian traffic in any way. Today I had to head out to the outer Delhi enclave called Nehru Place, which is where all the computer supply places are. The ride is 60 rupees and I didn't want to spend that to return, so I decided to find and take the bus. I waited at the bus stop for about 10 minutes before mine arrived. "Arrived" might not be quite the right word for the way it works in India, though -- the buses don't stop here. They drive by and slow down a little bit. They simply do not stop. I mean that. So I'm sitting there and watching all kinds of different buses pass by when one approaches with a guy hanging out the main door, banging his fist on the dented sheet metal and yelling "CP! CP!" Well, that's where I needed to go, so I jumped up and ran toward the bus. Like I said, the bus doesn't stop, so you have to just run alongside it and then grab the door frame and pull yourself up into it while it's moving. Entering a bus in India feels kind of like entering a weird dance club, except that it is more crowded and no one is dancing. They're just kind of swaying around with the movement and with the music, which is absolutely mandatory on any bus in India. Ethereal Hindi songs are blasted as if stopping them would cause the engine to shut down. I was lucky enough to enter as they played the "Acchhaa" song, which I love. (Probably the only person reading this that knows it is Matthias). It goes "Acchhaa, acchha, acchhaa, acchhaa, acchhaa!" One of these days I think I might write an entire post about the word "Acchhaa," which is basically the lynch pin of the entire Hindi language. It means everything. If you come to Northern India you can just go around saying "Acchhaa" and people would probably be quite happy with you.
The conductor immediately offered me some potato chips. Acchhaa. He didn't seem too concerned about the fare, which he collected from me 20 minutes later. 10 rupees. After a few minutes I was offered a seat on the consul bump covering the engine, right next to the driver. I grabbed onto various edges of things to avoid falling into him or his shift sticks as he yanked this bus from side to side through the traffic like a nintendo game. Occasionally he'd reach out the window and smack the canopy of some errant autorickshaw. He even crashed into one. That's one way to get someone to move, just run into them and push them out of the way. This is usually acceptable in India -- as long as there's no damage, it's fair game. A little shrine to Shiva stood on the dashboard, steadfast and indifferent to the chaos swirling about.
Getting off a bus in Delhi is fun, too. You jump off. Whole groups jump off in little sequences as the bus passes the more popular destinations. It's like being a paratrooper. It's great -- why waste time stopping and having everyone jam up in one spot when you can sort of throw them off the bus one by one, fertilizing Delhi's major thoroughfares with even more people. So that is how I arrived in Connaught Place -- landing on the pavement running, 50 rupees richer and fully energized by adrenaline and a good round of the Acchhaa song. Life is just more fun here. It is basically the polar opposite of America's lawsuit-dominated culture of safety and sanitization, of the sterilization of all life, the translation of all of life's experiences, risks, and thrills into insurance rates and statistics -- the quantification and encapsulation of every moment, every attempt at adventure. The playgrounds of our lives are all closed. You almost have to go outlaw to get any kind of rush back home. A major element of the "culture shock" so often described by travellers here has little to do with food or clothing or anything like that, but rather the mandatory abandonment of that (totally false) sense of safety and security the moment one steps out of the airport in Mumbai or Delhi. It just goes right in the trash. And suddenly you're alive again.
Part of me wants to stay in India for a very long time, and then go back to the States only to figure out how to come back here. "Here" is hopelessly vague -- India is at least as huge and diverse as all of Europe. It would take forever to even shallowly take a look around every state. More than 10 official languages, more than 10 different writings systems. I count only three writing systems (actually, one writing system, three alphabets within that system) in all of Europe, three in the whole Western world, in fact -- Roman, Greek, and Syrillic. And in Europe the languages are all part of the same broad family, except for a couple of pockets (Finland, Hungary, and Basque territory). In India they are wildly diverse, mostly falling into the two completely unrelated families -- Indo-European (Hindi and the gang) and Dravidian (Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu). Then there is a lot of Perso-Arabic material, too. So India is huge and it has taken hold of me, certainly, and captured my imagination. The nomadic, adrenaline-soaked lifestyle, though, has an even greater hold on me, and a big part of me wants to take it on the road to some other parts of the world's wilder side, like parts of Africa and South America. Mexico, maybe.
But India is endlessly wide and deep. And activism here is incredibly important -- India and China both have over a billion people and combined they hold a third of the world's people. Both countries are transforming rapidly, and how they transform and grow could determine the ecological fate of the planet. The issues surrounding the fight for Bhopal cut right to the heart of that growth -- is India going to make some decisions about what a country of billion people should be like, how Indians should treat each other and the environment on which we all depend? Or will it sell its people and its health off to the transnational corporations knocking on its door, who would love to set alight this full sixth of the world with a fire whose smoke would choke the globe. Will China and India compete with eachother for higher standards of health and justice, or will they crawl on the floor trying to out-bid each other for the attention of the rottenest people on earth?
Right now it doesn't look good. India has abandoned its sick in Bhopal. The government doesn't want to talk about it. They want everyone there to just die quietly and without complaint, to sacrifice themselves and just drink the damn water in the name of increasing foreign investment. And not just any foreign investment -- investment by the very same people who did this in the first place. The Prime Minister has been dining (literally) with Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris while thousands of people in Bhopal subsist on crumbs because they are too sick to work and earn a living. And why can't we help them? We don't want to offend our corporate friends. To fix the problem we must acknowledge the problem. And acknowledging that there is any problem might offend poor Andrew Liveris, who might sulk off to make pesticides in China instead. These chemicals have to be made and sold somewhere -- they can't take them to America or Europe because they've already been banned there. But we can count on India. India is hungry. What can you offer us now, India? Don't let this love affair end. It's too good. You always know the right things to say. You never bring up unpleasant subjects at the dinner table.
April 4
Today I received a wonderful compliment - a guy my age asked me quite seriously if I was Indian. This was after we had been talking for a couple of minutes in Hindi. "South Indian you mean, perhaps," I said -- i.e. an Indian who might not know much Hindi. Still, it was nice to hear. I have at least moved out of the "obviously-an-idiot" category on the street. Many people in India ask what country I am from. I usually say "New York". Republic of NYC. "USA" just means too many bad things over here and everywhere else in the world and almost no one I've encountered has even heard of Miami. I'm pretty sure that in many of the places we slept during the padyatra people had only vaguely heard of New York before.
Pizza Hut I went to a Pizza Hut here in Delhi. It's bad, I know. It bothers me because I do not like to cast a positive vote for spreading American fast-food chains to every part of the globe. The good news is that there is hardly any of that in all of India. Actually, it's more complicated. There is a ton of Coke and Pepsi. Even in the most remote towns in Madhya Pradesh, walls were painted with huge murals of the logos for Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Sometimes these murals exist even in places where the sodas are unavailable, presumably because the population is too poor to provide any sustained demand for them. So, there are many products like that all over India, especially with soda. Food not so much. But as far as chain businesses, I saw almost none until I came to Delhi. I saw my first McDonald's in all of India when we passed through Agra -- after I had been in the country for two months. I saw my second one here in Delhi. Only two so far. And zero Starbucks. ZERO Starbucks!! How great is that? There might be one hiding somewhere here in Delhi, but I think I would have seen it by now. So, anyway, I went to Pizza Hut. It looked, from the outside, like an experience worth having. It's totally different here. When I first saw it I looked in the window and was amazed to see that the space was filled with nice tables set with carefully arranged silverware and napkins. Maude and I were let in by a fancily uniformed doorman (yes, I am still talking about Pizza Hut) and then greeted by a host, who confirmed that we were a party of two before leading us to an appropriate table. We were then handed two menus and asked if we would like anything to drink. Five minutes later a waiter was explaining the different pizzas. Many pizzas were Indian-ified with all sorts of combinations of paneer tikka, other spices, and hot peppers. And everything was very expensive relative to other Indian restaurants. I looked around at the other diners. Well-to-do couples and a few families, all very quiet and dignified at their tables, enjoying pizza. Maude and I eventually ordered a basic vegetable pizza big enough for two people, for about Rs. 160, or $4. To give you an idea of how much money that is, our double hotel room with a private bathroom, hot water, and a sit-down toilet is Rs. 485. Yes, our hotel is shitty. But still, that's a lot for Pizza Hut. But we were looking at it from a totally different perspective. Back home Pizza Hut is a place where you want to spend as little time as possible, if you even go there at all. Most people just call for delivery. It's cheap. It's what you do when your day has developed in some way that prevents you from making better arrangements. And it is a place that doesn't even exist in NYC because New Yorkers won't have anything to do with it. But here it seems to be considered a pretty prestigious place to eat. After insisting on slicing and serving us our individual pieces of pizza, our waiter came back a couple of times to lean down and quietly ask if everything was all right. And then we heard this bell. We hadn't noticed when we came in, but right in front of the door was a frame from which hung a bell just like the ones that hang at temples. In fact that's the only place Maude or I had ever seen them before. When you enter a Hindu temple you raise your arm up and swing one or several bells with a flick of the hand as you walk in, and then do the same as you walk out. Pizza Hut Delhi had a sign that invited you to ring the bell if you liked your pizza. People were ringing this thing so much it was hard to talk.
