Here are few snapshots to prove the Ministry of Tourism's exuberant - and accurate - slogan. They may not be what the Ministry had in mind, but they are what I had in mind yesterday while enduring 12 hours of train travel from Simla, in the Himalyan foothiils, to Delhi, which is mercifully flat.
-A filthy young boy of 8 or 9 slides around the floor of the coach, brandishing a mediocre broom to collect everyone's trash (specifically, a huge amount of peanut shells) and send it out a door. He then asks for money, but is widely ignored and obviously recedes into the background of everyone's mind.
He appeared on the floor, and left on the floor. Unfortunately, not a very successful entrepreneur. Indians aren't all that willing to pay for a service they didn't request, and frankly, neither am I. But I gave him a few rupees so he would go away and give me peace of mind.
-As I am gazing at and photographing the overwrought, crumbling 18th-century tomb of the Mughal ruler Safdarjung (in Delhi), a cute boy enters the viewfinder's foreground. He continues to walk toward me, and continue taking photos: the contrast between a massive sandstone tomb and a 5-year-old boy is really great. He comes closer, closer, and even closer, until I realize he's actually stopped in front of me staring into my camera. I take a few more photos.
Then his mother and grandmother appear and demand money for the service I unwittingly accepted. I gave them some, they wanted more. The boy was still and silent. A very creative entrepreneur.
-Two jubilant drag queens wander through the train, teasing and flirting with anyone who'll acknowledge them, their shawls and convincing make-up jobs. Everyone in the coach (I am the only non-Indian) is clearly amused, in a I can't-believe-it sort of way. They stop next to me, one says something I can't understand, burst out laughing, and move on.
When I ask the guy across from me what he/she said, he responds: "They are a new kind of beggar." Well put. I think they do a bit better than traditionally gendered beggars. Because they're not really begging; they're performing. And all Indians, especially on gruelling train rides, love to be entertained.
I love how nonchalantly, how confidently, Indian women spit. Out of buses, trains, cars. (I have learned, thankfully not the hard way, to avoid walking close to parked buses full of people.) They may not be widely accepted as equals to men in all regards here, but when it comes to expectoration, the women here have most definitely been liberated.
It is essential to expunge oneself of all pollutants as quickly as possible.
Mcleod Ganj, aka Upper Dharamsala, aka the
home-in-exile of the 14th Dalai Lama, is a beautiful, festive, sad
place. Perched on nearly vertical, evergreen-studded hills in the far
western reaches of the Himalayans, it's the sort of place that makes
you feel lucky just to meet it.
But the more I get to know it, the sadder it
becomes. It's full of thousands of Tibetan refugees and hundreds of tourists, many
of whom have come here to meet the wise old Lama and engage in a bit of
spiritual tourism (which, I think, is the worst kind of tourism). He's
actually in town this week, and has been giving four-hour afternoon
teachings (on high-level meditation methods and philosophy I'm sure I
couldn't understand very well). The streets swell with crimson robes at
4:30 every afternoon as the Lama's refugee monk devotees head home.
It really is amazing: Perched on this little hill in
Northern India is the exiled spiritual and political center of a
kingdom that had been autonomous and stable for thousands of years.
Then, in 1949, the Chinese invaded. Fast forward 57 years, and I have
the strange and unexpected pleasure of learning about Tibetan culture
in India, to which the Lama fled in 1959.
So Darmasala is sad, but impressive: full of a
people eager to protect and maintain their culture after decades of
systematic destruction and violence at the hands of the Chinese. And
the tourists come, and even some serious students of Buddhism come, and
they are welcomed by the refugees, who need a source of income. And so,
in a wonderful and affecting way, Darmasala is a sort of living,
vibrant museum of Tibetan culture.
But, unlike a museum's exhibits, it doesn't exist in
a vacuum. The young Tibetans around town seem fairly
Westernized, many quite fluent in English. I wonder if they're really
willing to stay in these mountains to dedicate their lives to the
maintenance of a civilization that is being destroyed by the Chinese
basically with impunity. The fad of the 1990s "Free Tibet" movement of
the 90s is now over (I wonder if Beastie Boy MCA is still fighting for
the cause). The Chinese President was in New Delhi this week; hundreds
of Tibetan refugees protested in the capitol, and one man even set
himself on fire (he was extinguished by police). The Tibet question
didn't come up during the Indo-Sino talks. India, and the rest of the
world, it seems, has more important things things to worry about:
namely, trade with China (i.e., making money).
Meanwhile, Darmasala chugs along in the mountains at
its lazy, charming pace. In this atmosphere, it's easy to forget that
I'm in exiled capitol of Tibet. The 14th Dalai Lama single-handedly
embodies Tibet, and by fleeing the Chinese he symbolically took his
country with him.
And when he dies? Get a load of this: The 15th Lama,
which the current Lama recognized in 1995, was kidnapped by the Chinese
government in 1996 (they have admitted taking him). He was only 6 years
old! What a depraved, desperate measure! To hold a boy prisoner for 10
years simply because he is the next in line to lead Tibetans. Could
more repulsive evidence of Chinese imperialism and guilt be found? I
don't think so.
What luck I had to be born into my life! What random, amoral madness is this world!
I don't know which is worse: the constant,
overpowering visibility of India's crushing poverty, or the fact one
must learn to tolerate it to remain sane. At first the choice appears
obvious: of course the actual poverty is worse. But the more I dwell on
the miserable topic (and I have probably too much time to do so), the
more convinced I become that each, the poverty and the tolerance if it,
are equally bad because they reinforce each other.
The only natural response for anyone with just an
iota of complacency in his soul is to accept and learn to tolerate the
vast multitude of millions here that live on about $1 per day. This, I
suspect, is what the majority of Indians do. I can't blame them; I've
already learned to live with it after three and a half weeks, just as I
lived with it in Sri Lanka. I've given cash to random NGOs and
occasional beggars, but have no real solutions whatsoever to India's
basic problem.
That problem is constant, panoramic and very old.
And the cause of it is obscure: Are the British to blame, since they
systematically blocked India's industrialization? Or is it the caste
system which buttresses indifference to inequality? Or maybe we should
point to the endemic corruption? Or maybe, one could argue, it's simply
an environmental problem, the result of too many people in too little
space. I suppose all of these options are partially to blame.
Whatever the causes, the conditions perpetuate
themselves, generation after generation. It's hard for me to shake the
feeling that poverty on this scale, beside such growing and glaring
wealth, can only exist through callous indifference and the complicity
of the affluent. To complete this post's circle, this tolerance of
poverty is as bad as the poverty itself, because it allows it to
continue. The latter indicts the former.
But let me be clear: I could learn to live with, and
tolerate, this misery. I would tell myself it's not my fault, I was
just born lucky, I didn't create the terrible conditions. I would tell
myself fantastic excuses. Because at base I am a very selfish person.
That, I've found, is one of the main things traveling in developing
countries has taught me.
There's a great irony to this: Tourism has pulled a
lot of Indians (not to mention Tibetans refugees, who are almost the
majority in Dharmasala, where I write) out of poverty. So I always have
an escape clause to my classic, liberal guilt: My presence here as a
tourist is a good in and of itself. That notion jolts me awake: Have I
become a trickle-down economist? It would be appropriate, because
that's the policy route of today's post-socialist, nouveau capitalist
India. The poor are still getting only crumbs from the pie, but their
crumbs are just a bit bigger than they used to be.
Six days in Delhi taught me to like the sprawling capitol, despite its
acrid, putrid air. (Not a good place to fight off respiratory
challenges.) Mostly, I loved it because of its layers of history, all
exposed and viewable through monuments and various neighborhoods that
are still very much alive.
The scale of New Delhi compared to the central
market district and Old Delhi is stunning. New Delhi, built mostly in
the 1920s by the British to host the colony's new capitol (it had been
Calcutta), is utterly planned: geometrical and Western.
Rastrapati Bhavan, the former British
Viceroy/Governor General's home and current residence of India's
president (who is, marvelously, a Muslim), is truly giant, opulent on a
scale completely unknown in the halls of American government. Flanked
to the east by the Ministry of Defense and Interior, the whole gated
edifice imposes itself on the landscape brutally, with very little
poetry. I was pleased to see monkeys all over the Defence Ministry's
stone walls, as though plotting a brilliant primate putsch.
New Delhi, completely designed by India's imperial
master, was inherited by the newly independent government in 1948. As
far as I can tell, it has remained totally unchanged during the last 58
years (buildings were added, of course, but essentially everything
is the same). I didn't bother visiting the Parliament building, but its
position in New Delhi reveals its position of power in British India:
it's off to the side of Viceroy's palace, basically out of view from
the pomp of the Rajpath stretching from Rastrapati to India Gate.
So strange: that the capitol of the world's largest
democracy still smells like Britain's ridiculous, old imperial
furniture. I wanted to puke with disgust at the bloated expresion of
imperial power. (Instead, I coughed exhaust.) The whole thing reeks of
the Raj, the need to express and justify imperial power through
monumental buildings. It's the worst use of architecture. At least
Paris' government buildings, although built to impress, are beautiful and even subtle. The Raj's buildings (like
the Raj itself) are just plain imperious, built to awe millions of
Indians into submission. It's amazing the whole system held up as long
as it did.
India's newspapers seem to give prominent coverage -
on a daily basis - to stories about the growing wealth and power of
Indian-Americans. One week ago the Times of India fronted a story which
was really the announcement and unveiling of a study (a lot of the
newspaper stories here are actually glorified press releases, but
that's true in the US as well) of Indian-Americans in venture-capital
businesses.
According to this study, 28% of all US businesses
founded by immigrants with venture capital in the last five years were
founded by people born in India. Clearly, this is impressively out of
proportion with the number of Indian-Americans. The story ran in the
paper with a big graphic titled "Indian global dominance?" - or
something close to that.
The English-language press here - which mostly
reflects the lives and minds of the elite - is full of confidence, high
hopes, certainty that India is on her way to world dominance. In
general, I've found the confidence and patriotism of Indians to be one
of their greatest qualities. And regarding the country's imminent
ascension as a world power, they are probably right. (I remember in
Jaisalmer, a small shopkeeper said to me: "India will be a world power
in 10 years." Then he told me George Bush recently called him so they
could chat about this.) The US-Indo civilian nuclear power agreement
approved by the US Senate last week implicitly acknowledges and
encourages the growth and power (in this case, literally) of India.
Personally, I think this is great, although patently hypocritical of
the US (Hint: Iran).
But as persuasive as the confidence of Indians is,
it's also disturbing. This is a country with only a 65% literacy rate
and a 40% poverty rate. That's about 400 million people who live on no
more than $1 per day. For such confidence and dynamism to come from a
country with such fundamental problems is stunning - and reminds me of
the US, only on a much larger and more severe scale.
Indian CNN is ridiculous in a subtle way. Its
format, graphics, pacing and background music are identical to American
CNN. All anchor-people are beautiful women (easier on the eyes than
Wolf Blitzer), and stories are regurgitated ad naseum (redundant
phrasing?), which seems to be the inherent frustration for anyone
watching a 24-hour news channel. A few stories shared with US CNN, a
few stories actually interesting.
But the station, like the other English-language TV
I've seen here, floats strangely above the country. Obviously targeted
for the elite: only 2% of all Indians are fluent in English. Watching
it, you'd think all Indians speak English, take holidays to South
Africa and get excited about the new James Bond film.
Indian CNN is a fascinating window into this
country's mind-boggling ineqalities. The English-speaking elite seems
to lord it over the masses, living in luxury that would make many
well-off Americans blush. Yet they may be respected as much as the
British were (not all that much, but enough for the unequal system to
remain stable). It's a society scarily similar to the Raj: A
Westernized elite rules a massive amount of people; lip service to
democracy is paid, but change is glacial. (There have been measurable
gains for India's poor in the last 15 years, though.) Equitable
socio-economic changes seem to happen in spite of larger trends and the
dictates of society's hierarchical, casted structure.
The answer for positive change and social justice in
the future may have to be taken from the US political economy's
playbook: Don't redistribute money from the top down, make the whole
pie bigger. To those who say that takes too long, well, 40 years of
Indian socialism didn't work. Why not give capitalism a shot?
It's funny. I can't stand almost all American TV,
but when I'm traveling abroad I find it absolutely mesmerizing. Except
for cricket news. I hate cricket with demonic passion.
Varsha darted out of the tiny, dusty schoolyard barefoot: She was the
only one of Ashaki Kiran's (A very young, Swiss-backed NGO) nine
students without thin plastic flip-flops. Her teacher doesn't know her
last name because the child's mother won't reveal it.
Which is exactly why Varsha's teacher, Mamta Adha, who co-manages the
guesthouse I stayed at in Jaipur, knows she's from a scheduled caste.
She is only five. This is her first school. She could be six, or even
seven. There is no birth certificate to prove Varsha's age; the closest
thing is her mother's memory. ("What year was it when she showed up?...")
I suspect the parents of all the children I met at Ashaki Kiran
wouldn't have sent their kids if lunch wasn't provided. It was only
porridge (millet-based, very Dickensian) and a banana, but better than
what they might have scrounged up, alone, at home.
It's hard to believe that this tiny, one-school NGO will have any
serious impact on these kids. It's true that they wouldn't be in any
school, at all, otherwise. (No government school in the neighborhood,
and private schools in vicinity too expensive due to transport costs,
tuition; also, many parents apathetic and want their 5 and 6-year old
children to look after their even younger children while they work.)
But the teaching was so haphazard, so rote, so completely unregulated.
Will learning the English and Hindi alphabet enable these kids to
overcome the ancient barriers and baggage of caste and poverty? It
hardly seems likely. But it can't hurt to experiment. The food is the
crux of the school, I think.
I almost began crying in the middle of the "English" lesson. A few
students stood up at the front of the class and, very quickly and
thoughtlessly, said this "Christian prayer":
"Oh God,
Thank you to give me this beautiful day.
I will try
my best to be good and honest.
If I make something wrong I ask you
sorry.
Amen."
It was so very strange to hear these words come from the minds of
dirt-poor, lowest-caste Hindus. The kids had no idea what they were
saying, and no idea why it was so completely sad.
Already, I am falling in love with India.
With its vastness. With its impressive and
bewildering array of people and cultures - food, dress, music, various
forms of Hinduism, along with Sikkhism, Islam, Jainism, Buddhism.
With its seemingly limitless ability to bridge
antiquity and modernity, and its (directly related) ability to ingest
and digest invading cultures, from the Aryans to the Turks to the
Mughals to the British to the Americans. This is the ultimate syncretic
culture.
With its confidence. The civilization has been here
forever (about 5,000 years), and it will not disappear anytime soon.
Just a hunch.
Sri Lanka's diversity was impressive in relation to
its size - 20 million people, the 4 major religions, a variety of
landscapes, all in a space the size of West Virginia.
But India's diversity is impressive in relation to
the rest of the world. What other country can boast such a
kaleidoscope? Perhaps only America - but its relative youth makes its
claim somewhat laughable. And India will outlast America anyway.
Because the U.S. is founded on - defined by - its political
organization. India's political form has gone through many phases, and
it will do so in the future. Indian civilization runs so much deeper
than politics.
The caste system, paradoxically, has proved
amazingly adaptive - or repellent - to new rulers and political
structures, not to mention egalitarian religious movements (Buddhism,
Jainism). On the one hand, the caste system has imprisoned Indian
society and energies. On the other hand, it has proved to be a
remarkable durable vessel through which Indian culture has endured.
It's even managing to weather the current democratic storm: rather than
democratic politics eroding the caste system, the caste system has
simply responded to the new democratic environment. A political party
for Untouchables, enfranchising those who by definition are
disenfranchised. Democracy may actually be strengthening, deepening,
the caste system. This reminds me of Hamas winning the Palestinian
election. Not a good day for George Bush.
But I've only been here 20 days. Perhaps the
honeymoon will soon end, and I'll stop concentrating on this country's
gorgeous features and begin staring at her warts: the brutal poverty,
and the indifference of most Indians to it.
November 10
Thar Desert, Rajasthan
lunch stop in Nowheresville
The camels have gone grazing - hopefully they'll
return - and Abi Babal, my guide/chef cooks lunch. A 5-year-old boy
just walked out from nowhere into our little makeshift dune camp. His
body language says he is 17. Obviously, no school for him, only desert
farming.
We passed small, spread-out herds of goats, a few
sheep. Pairs of donkeys, horses, a few cattle, other solo camels ridden
by villagers. Land stretches nearly flatly - ridges punctuate this
expanse - in all directions, with a surprising amount of vegetation.
This is not the Sahari, this is the Thar, which receives 10 or 20 days
of sporadic monsoon rain annually. Thus I can spy a light dusting of
grass across the landscape.
Still, this is barely inhabitable land. A few
intrepid farmers sow corn, millet, cucumbers - all water comes from
monsoon collecting points. Small basins, still nearly full months after
the "monsoon." Amazing. Mud huts have been upgraded to small brick
houses.
My camel's name is Modhi, which means "peacock" in
Rajasthani. He is not nearly as charming as a peacock, but rather is
all the things camels are: awkward, graceless, strange-looking,
unintelligent, reliable, harmless and (this one at least) highly tamed.
He tolerates my weight, but doesn't seem to like me. I don't think he
likes anyone.
So suureal to not just be slowly moving across a
desert on a camel, but to slowly become aware that you are not alone
here. That small villages are stowed away, women gather water,
livestock grazes, boys play, human life goes on, in a very basic way,
at the very edge of civilization. Nothing between here and Pakistan but
soldiers, guns, tanks, bullets and bombs.
