skip's blog

India in conclusion

The quality of English spoken by an educated Kolkattan is bears remarking. This is high British English, to the point where I felt like I’d better watch how I expressed myself. These people speak my language remarkably. Most Americans strive to speak it adequately.

In Hyderabad, Salil did much to show me the way into the culture, and I decided to take his advice and give people the cue as to how I wanted to interact with them. The young people I was around – progressive art folk, mind you – didn’t really stand much on the social ceremony you read about in the “Your Trip To India” guidebooks. They talk politics, are often dismissive of religion, and they offer the hand to shake instead of putting the palms together in the “namiste”, although everyone’s appreciative when you know or ask about Indian vocabulary words. But they’re all reading the newspaper in English.

The students here had the classic Indian work ethic. They held themselves and their work to exhautive standards, asked a million questions, then came back up individually to Tracy to ask more specific questions. The newspaper reporters there to do small feature pieces about Tracy’s streetpainting workshop were painstaking. I would often speak to them before the interview, and they gave much care to the subject.

Let’s put statistics back into the spotlight for a second. India has 1.4 billion people, 82% of whom live below the poverty line. That you got into a good school or got a good job means you stood on some pretty generous shoulders to get above that line. The Indians I met often spoke about about not letting down the people who made their progress possible. And the way these people put their shoulder to the wheel is… It’s an ongoing lesson in not fucking around.

The GCAC is a lively place by any standard. The female students are in sarees and Western dress. I saw a kind of median Indian thing there where there gals dressed in sarees but were made up in a modest though contemporary Western makeup. The young men are look like they might as well shop on Melrose. Lotsa beards, too.
Being around so many people half my age, in another country, from an economy I can’t even begin to fathom, I was reminded of James Agee’s words about the book he wrote, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – how it was "an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity." The people in this college have divinity in themselves and their work. But just beyond the gate, I saw an armless man laying on the sidewalk, having convulsions as the people on the street walked by him.
By any American standard, I’m poor. I won’t go into it, because I’m not going hungry or homeless, but I make little enough that I’d qualify for food stamps and so forth, should I elect to (which I never have and doubt I will). One of the students with whom I became friendly, Abir, asked me what my economic standing was compared to other Americans, and I told him basically what I just wrote. He took it in thoughtfully before he spoke.

“I aspire to be poor like you,” he said, with some finality.

I took a million pictures of the students and the campus. A college full of professors and teachers kept young by a battalion of smart young people who roll through life with their sleeves rolled up.

Dipali made the Bengali lunch for us the second day. Smita, who has been on staff at the American Center since the Carter administration, joined, as did our American point person at the American Center, Moulik. A woman named Nandita Palchoudouri was also there. She seemed to have some sort of diplomatic function and travelled back and forth between India and the States. Her training had been Indian classical vocal music. To me, she was like an Indian Lauren Bacall – grace, charm, gentle wit, and serious brains, and a beauty besides. We discussed Indian film music while waiting to be served.

Dipali would have made a fantastic South Philadelphia Italian. The meal she prepared was just wonderful. She hosted the luncheon beautifully, but has no fear of being outspoken. She, Nandita, and Smita were at the center of the discussion, even though there were as many men at the table (me, two professors, and one visiting painter) as women. But the educated women in these parts don’t defer.
A lot of the discussion over our lunch that day centered on how visitors perceive Kolkatta. There is no way to discuss Kolkatta without discussing poverty and pollution. Smita had an extremely nuanced view of the problem.

Smita pointed out how first time visitors to India too often fixate on one problematic aspect of India and think, “Well, if you could just solve the poverty …”
Again, to the statistics. And any Indian will likely back me on this:
You’ve got 1.4 billion – billion with a B –people living in this country. Only three hundred million – 300,000,000 – live above the poverty line. This means the levels of poverty are relative. A guy who pulls a rickshaw in Kolkatta is living above the poverty level. But he lives someplace (generally) and has an income and – while it is doubtless he knows nights where he’s hungry – he’s a step ahead of starving. Things could be worse for him, and they will be if he loses his rickshaw. He doesn’t make enough to write checks for anything, let alone to have savings. But he makes enough to eat, and to live in one of the local hostels. By American standards, the hostels are rough accommodation, but they streets of Kolkatta are worth fighting to stay off of.

When poverty has tiers like this and so many people on those tiers, please know that nothing can happen quickly to change the system. No matter how you try to streamline things, you’re still trying to wag a very big dog. There are 1.1 billion people who the system must address. It’s elephantine in its scale.

The guy driving the rickshaw isn’t begging. He’s not a sexworker hustling on the streets of a really intense city, assured of death either from getting by STD’s or one of the other consequences of street life. So, although he’s not making good dough, he’s making a living at all and is therefore solvent by Indian standards. As for some type of government service to bring remedy to him or the people in even tougher circumstances, the first question is “Where do you start?”, and thus far it has not been given an answer that anyone has been able to implement.

This sounds insane, but when you look even casually at the local options, you can see how poverty is better than starvation.

This is all being explained to me in painstaking detail by a table full of bright, progressive Indian educators. We’re in the faculty room on the second floor. On the grounds all of a staircase below us, there’s a campus full of students who owe that they’re in art college to a lot of people who have sacrificed and worked and gone without. These kids are joyous for their opportunity, but they have a resolve unlike anything you’ve seen in an American art school.

Not that they’re not having a good time. They are. I got to be pals with some of the guys on campus (some of them were really into music), so they invited me to go hang with them at night, which was not really an option for me. I didn’t really interact that much with the females unless they had a bindi – the red mark or forehead dot that indicates they’re married. I know what the protocols are for dealing with married women in any culture, which is to say “married” has a pretty universal definition, but young and unmarried and bound to religious customs I don’t understand? The guidebook has several paragraphs on whether or not you’re even allowed to shake hands, and who can keep all that straight? Also, I was there in an official capacity and didn’t wanna give anybody something to apologize for.

Eventually, I gave short order to that self-consciousness and just decided I’d hug whoever I wanted to hug, shake whoever’s hand I wanted to shake, and be done with it. These were the educated, progressive people in town. I figured they’d take everything in the spirit I intended, which was the right thing to do.

I had my confusion sometimes. I won’t lie. Sometimes I felt closer to these people than I can tell you. Other times, I felt like a tourist with a typewriter, to quote Barton Fink. At one point, someone produced a guitar and asked me to sing a song about my home for them. I played them “California Blues” by Jimmie Rodgers. I wondered if any of them had heard a country song played live before. I’m pretty sure mine was the only John Hartford t-shirt in India that day.

All these little three day workshop events made for fast alliances. You often became best friends with people in land speed record time. In Delhi, Aakshat and Gaurav were my brothers. In Hyderabad, Salil and Ahmet were my posse. But Kolkatta… I felt close to everybody. The students were into hanging out, Smita and Moulik were into hanging out, and it was such an open feeling. You could say whatever to whomever. I couldn’t walk past Dipali without embracing her. I really loved these people.

I felt like James Agee – on his low-budget non-union counterpart – on our last day there. There were passages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that were always hard for me, because I thought it was unreasonable that a guy so rational as Agee would give his heart to relative strangers after a week of being in their company. But I know now how and why things are that way if you care about people at all.

I can get up at you about the life I saw walking down the street all I want. But the other side of all this is that I went back to a hotel every night. I was in an embassy car. I was somebody’s employee, I had a function. I was well cared for, and no matter what difficulties I saw up close as I walked main stem, I knew I was coming home, that I was not having to make a life in a city as tough as Kolkatta.

People have this strange idea that a trip to India will give you some special spiritual enlightenment, more than anyplace in the west can ever give you. Every Indian I met with an IQ above room temperature was offended by this notion.

“Visiting ruins won’t make you more spiritual,” said my wise friend Salil, “but they will give you insight about how people build great buildings, which is not only intellectually rewarding, but also practical.”

Moulik Berkana, who works at the American Center, told me over dinner one night that “India embraces everything and discards nothing. Contradictions are part of the design of India. You arrive here thinking that you know something about the country, but the longer you’re here, the more you give in to that you couldn’t possibly know less.”

(Moulik is American, by the way.)

The preconceived notions are like those about anything as big and complex as India – they’re stupid and even kind of bigoted. There are all these social/political/religious concepts that shape people’s lives. And there are cell phones and Coca Cola and movies and dating and all the things that determine whether or not we’re having fun, just like in California or Toronto.

The pollution and crowding are more intense than any we have in the United States. But the people who grew up in it work with it, work through it, deal with it. It’s not like Slumdog Millionaire. It’s more like a very crowded version of Bed-Stuy. Yeah, it’s tough. Yeah, achievement is so often a light shining under a barrel of decay. But enough people succeed that life continues.

Me, I didn’t really go looking for the religious nature of India. My question to myself was more like “If I grew up here and came through this world, what would I be?”

I found out I’d be an American, an answer which is neither evasive nor helpful.

The truth of this trip was that – to my mind – everybody in the world is born with a ticket he didn’t write for himself. You go where the train takes you, and fuck you for thinking you can negotiate. Life isn’t like that. The journey begins when you get “there”, and god help you if you’re not humble.

posted by skip heller @ 7:13 PM 1 Comments