skip's blog

India Pt 3

The hustle-bustle of Main St Hyderabad is contrasted by UH’s green, loping hills.

To get from our hotel, the Taj Krishna in the Banjara Hills section of town (heart of the Western shopping district), to the campus is about 30 minutes, give or take for traffic. Salil would arrive in a minivan, driven by Ahmet, and off we’d go, through shopping, new construction, and all the other stuff that constitutes typical life in India’s modern city. As it turns out, there may or may not be transit strike looming in town. Ahmet’s college student daughter calls him on his cell phone. Her bus is late, so the strike may now be on.

The morning drive through the city to the campus is my favorite part of the day despite its being, you know… morning. Salil is both erudite and avuncular, and I have a ton of questions about the day-to-day mechanics of India.

In the Hindu city of New Delhi, the cows are sacred, so cows walk around wherever. The streets are lousy with cows. But Hyderabad is mostly Muslim, and still the cows have full right of way. I don’t get it. Salil explains:

“Although Hyderabad is mostly Muslim, India is a Hindu country. The question of how much deference would be afforded the cows was discussed by the Muslim clerics, who handed down a fatwa that said that, since the Hindus are in the majority, then we – the Muslims – should respect their rules.

“But most of the Hindus today eat beef. The law is more for… Well, people can be very sentimental about religion.”

The poverty through the city is hard to avoid. Again there are the small-engine motorcycles, and those driving tend to wear surgical masks, because the pollution is horrifying. There are a lot of busses out, because we’re going to work around the same time as everyone else. The vast majority of the new buildings is adjacent to one of the little tin and raincoat plastic Hoovervilles that are ubiquitous through all of India.

“This is one of the things people don’t seem to understand about India,” according to Salil.

“That’s where the people working on the buildings live. That’s the workers’ housing. It’s one way they can actually hold on to the money they make, to live cheaply. It’s not as if these structures are built to tower over those less fortunate.”

Still, these are harsh accommodations by any standard.

The city’s burgeoning IT call center industry has not only raised buildings, but also a new course of education – accent-neutral English. Several of the local institutes of higher learning have had to issue fatwa’s of their own, to keep SMS/text language out of the classroom. It’s irony on the hoof – in the quest to service American computer users, India seems in danger of losing its ability to speak really good English.

And, of course, there are the shacks and shanties that crop up not in the shadows of new construction, but rather wherever there’s room. Not at all far from the foothills that lead up to the campus, there was one such community, with cows milling around. In the midst of a rocky clearing, peeking out from between the blue plastic and tin, was a breathtaking view of Hyderabad. More irony.

The students in Hyderabad were smart and motivated. These are some of India’s best and brightest, and they work at it. The opportunity to see Tracy Lee Stum streetpaint up close and get dirty participating with her to create new work – this was the hot ticket on campus.

For all of my describing the campus as something of a tropical outpost, it’s amazingly typical, especially when you consider it’s in India. Throw in a few Big Lebowski t-shirts and it could be Tucson. The kids tool around on bicycles and even a few small CC cycles. Few if any wear helmets. Students and faculty alike hang out at a little student coffee bar, the Goodwill Canteen, which is something of a toolshed that serves Indian-sized (re: microscopic) cups of coffee and tea. The climate is pretty much like Bakersfield in June – that “starting to get hot” with median humidity setting – so student and faculty are in shirtsleeves, tieless. The few female faculty members I meet are all in unfussy western dress. The only sarees I spot are worn by students. Everybody has cell phones, but they’re the inexpensive type. Salil and Juliet have Blackberries, but that’s about it. I don’t spot any iPhones in India, either.

The coffee here is a flavored creamy instant called, beguilingly enough, Brew. It’s not bad, but you don’t object so much when they send out tea instead. I spent a lot of time at the Goodwill Canteen, talking art and politics with the students and faculty, and this was a switched-on bunch of people. Sham Sunder, who is 61 and head of the Fine Arts department, was my new best friend. His English was outmatched by his enthusiasm, and he rapidly spoke of music, architecture, art, his wife, poetry, and the new construction blooming on the campus. We’d sneak off – him for a smoke, me for a miniature coffee – and he’d enthuse over some work of art or a new building coming up that I simply had to see. Students walked up and either invited him to a campus party or asked why he didn’t show up for a recent function to which he had been invited. These kids love him. Obvious to see why. He's a lovely person.

The big news on campus that week was that the week before, President Obama had visited China and had played down India’s primacy in Asia. Although Obama is looked upon as a vast improvement over George W. Bush, it’s moves like this that leave the American agenda open to India’s skepticism. Rightfully. And these damn Indians are so polite and measured in their expressions of disagreement that…

These were the conversations that brought me into the place, and – whether at my station behind the camera or when I was hookying with Sham at the canteen. I wound up every night confirming new friends with Indian (and Iranian) names on Facebook and reading their enthusiastic messages about the day’s streetpainting.

(Tracy had turned the area in front of the student museum into a festival of chalk murals. There were 3-D/anamorphic chalk drawings all over. One good Indian afternoon rain pretty much wiped those out. The last day, she did a smaller Renaissance-styled piece that turned out to be a huge hit, with students taking interactive pictures of and with the streetpainting.)

Despite that it was exam week, the students were out in force, and there was a “blow off steam” atmosphere around the streetpaintings. Not MTV spring break woo-hoo, but something a helluva lot more graceful.

I have made no secret of how crowded I found India, obviously. But Indians are accustomed to it. I’ve come to the conclusion that manners and procedures are a kind of way to keep one’s personal space intact in so densely packed a place.

Three days around the campus also meant that I got to look closely at the buildings and the resources proper. High speed internet in India is slower than you’d hope. The bathrooms still largely use the old Turkish toilets, which are basically a hole in the floor with a toilet seat. Yes it flushes, but bring your own paper. The urinals are a curious matter as well. They look at first sight just like their American counterparts, but they’re not connected to a pipe. Instead, holes are drilled in the base, so the urinal drains into a gutter below and water runs through that. It gets the job done, but sometimes I wonder if India was designed by Rube Goldberg. Everything works, but efficiency and expediency of design… not in the sense that an American is used to.

posted by skip heller @ 11:22 AM