“PAAAPEEERRR, PAAAAPEEERRAA, PAAAAAPEEEERAAAA”
I wake up to the piercing, nasal cry of the neighborhood newspaper boy announcing that he has news to sell. It’s 8 am on a Sunday, and I grumble groggily to myself about the lack of zoning laws in India, knowing full well that if the newspaper boy is already making his rounds, the grocery woman will shortly be arriving with her own incomprehensible call, and the neighborhood badminton players will soon take the street for their morning game. I admire their dedication (and bravery, considering that they are playing in the middle of an Indian road), but the hollow, rhythmic popping sound does not help me fall back asleep.
It’s my second weekend in Bangalore, which means that my time in this city is already about 1/8 over, and I haven’t even moved out of a hotel, but that should be happening in a few days. I’ll be spending another 3 months or so here, and I hope to develop something of a life though that might be difficult for a number of reasons, foremost among them is the length of the stay. In any case, moving into a permanent residence will be a step in the right direction.
Using the internet, I’ve found a 3 bedroom house in Koramangala, one of the hipper neighborhoods in Bangalore, meaning that it has a higher concentration of “pubs” and western food chains such as Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Spar. It’s a nice place, and my future housemates seem like good guys. They are both North Indians who have spent a combined 15 years or so in Bangalore. P. is a 30-year-old designer who is slightly taller than me and built like a tank. A. is in his mid-20s and works for Yahoo! as a programmer (I think) though he hopes to go to Europe for a PhD in human-machine interactions. He’s possibly the only person I know who I would recommend the biography, Alan Turing: Enigma, to – definitely one of the more painful reads I’ve ever tackled. Having lived in Bangalore for so long, they know the city well and have large social networks. I feel a little like I’m buying friends and insider knowledge by renting the place, but I guess I don’t mind cheating too much.
It’s not that I really need to cheat because so far I think that I’m doing a decent job of making friends and seeing things. Last weekend was very busy and this week, I had adventures after work on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (Tuesday only half counts because I just went to the movies by myself – sitting in my hotel room was driving me crazy). Most things in India I find difficult to accomplish, e.g. navigating the city, finding a tailor, or getting a haircut, but I seem to be really good at getting people’s numbers, much better than I ever was at doing the same thing back home. In fact, you could even say that I accomplish this feat effortlessly. For example, waiting for the bus to work on Thursday, half-asleep, with a minor headache, and listening to my iPod, I was approached by a man who tried to engage me in conversation, asking the traditional questions, “What is your good name? Where are you from basically? Where are you staying? Do you have any friends?” Answering without any enthusiasm, I still performed well enough to initiate the ritual swapping of digits. I later got a call from him, and it turned out he had an ulterior motive for getting my number, but this isn’t usually the case. I frequently collect 3 or 4 numbers in a day from people who are simply friendly and who are looking out for me.
Aside from an attempt to attain a spot in the Guinness Book of World records under the category of longest address book, the purpose of my trip to India is to perform a four month internship at India’s largest and apparently most prestigious, Indian-owned biopharmaceuticals company. The biopharmaceuticals industry differs from pharmaceuticals industry only in that they often derive bioactive materials from engineered biological systems, but really, I don’t know that much about it either. I’ve been assigned to a project in the chemistry R&D department, but my project is technically confidential so I can’t fill you in on all the details. Basically, it seems that I will be working to optimize, for manufacture, the synthesis of a generic version of a drug currently being sold in the U.S. I’ve just begun to get used to the new lab, and tomorrow, I will start working independently on my own project. Lab work in India is somewhat amusing to me, but I will save that topic for another post.
My job started last Thursday, and in general, have been enjoying it. My lab mates and I find plenty of things to laugh about even if most of the time we are laughing at each other for doing or saying something stupid or culturally ignorant. I catch myself often thinking about the cultural divide, using the broad categories "us" and "them" to help me understand my world. I find it hard to tell the difference between a genuine cultural characteristic and a mere stereotype. Is there a difference? I believe, if a place can be said to have a particular culture, then that culture must have certain, definable characteristics, but the difficulty is determining what those characteristics are. I'm sure I'm stumbling upon a problem that is very prominent in Anthropology, and maybe, I should do a little reading before I continue on in this uninformed, rambling vein. My last thought on the subject, for now, is perhaps I'm approaching the whole thing from the wrong perspective and shouldn't think about it in such a post-Enlightenment manner, which, I'm told, in the logic of discourse, inevitably imposes an artificial hierarchy based upon the relationship of knowledge and power. Let me wrap my head around that idea and I'll get back to you.
I think I feel the cultural divide more at work than elsewhere because many of my co-workers seem to come from more conservative backgrounds (they are chemistry nerds, not renegades) and the language barrier is more noticeable. Though I’m trying to learn Hindi, I don’t know a word of Kannada, the local Indian language, so I rely on others to speak English, which they do with varying degrees of fluency. It’s a measure of my arrogance that I’m frustrated my co-workers don’t all speak English as well as I expected them to, but the challenge of communication is ultimately a secondary issue. What is a bigger deal is the vague, unsettling feeling of otherness and differentness that I have when interacting with most Indians. This feeling cannot simply be overcome by speaking a language better.
Already, on my second trip to India, I feel more exposed and vulnerable than I ever did during my first trip (to be fair, I’m also on my own this time instead of with friends from home), but I'm finding that it’s pleasant to feel a little exposed and vulnerable. You should see me trying to deal with transportation. I’m always lost in a rather bemusing way, doing and encountering ridiculous things at every corner. This email/blog will serve as a sort of lost record, a record of me getting lost, acting lost, and feeling lost, and, just like my past email/blog communications, a way for me to stay in touch with friends and family at home. It’s amazing how distance is much less of an impediment to communication than culture can be.
This past weekend, I was told by an Indian friend that Westerners who come to India cannot expect to control their environment or else they will have a terrible, frustrating time and will hate every minute they are there. Rather, in India, you have to go with the flow, “you have to be a surfer,” and that’s what I’m trying to do, just riding the waves wherever they take me and quickly paddling to the surface whenever I wipe out.
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| I rode on this double decker plane. Wow! |
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| This is the Bangalore campus of Wipro, which I was told is an Indian call center. It's not, but other companies in Bangalore are. When you call customer service, you may be calling a guy right down the block from me. |
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| View from my balcony. Note the cows in the neighboring lot. |
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| View from the balcony. |
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