Freshly squeezed

         My roommate A. recently purchased a second-hand fridge for our spacious 3 BHK (bedroom hall kitchen) house.  Up until a few days ago, all perishables were consumed within twenty four hours or not consumed at all, but now with the power of modern science and the first law of thermodynamics working in our favor, we can store things like leftovers, yogurt, milk, eggs, meat, etc.  To celebrate the occasion, I went out and purchased some Tropicana OJ, a sorely missed fixture of breakfast.  There are plenty of juice stands in India selling freshly squeezed pineapple, grape, banana, musk melon, lime, mosambi and papaya juice, but it's not really orange season and besides these places aren't open in the morning when orange juice is most needed. (Surprisingly, juice stands are open almost as late as the bars which are required to close by 11:30.  Pineapple juice night-cap, anyone?)  So trusty Tropicana I acquired.  With relish, I opened the container this morning only to discover that the fluorescent orange liquid in my glass did not resemble the pulpy, pale yellow-orange liquid I fondly remember.  More distressing still, it didn't even remotely taste like Tropicana OJ, but rather a sugary, watered-down Tang analogue.  Sure enough, the beverage had been modified for the Indian market with added water, added sugar, added color, and reduced price.  Say goodbye to not from concentrate.  Nooooooooooo...

           To add calamity to disaster, the fluorescent light in my room prefers not to turn on in the mornings because, I'm guessing, it, like me, would rather wake up after the sun comes up.  When it does manage to produce some light, it flickers on and off, making my room resemble an ill-attended rave and adding further challenge to the already difficult task of getting ready for work.  I lost one of the pads for my headphones the other morning and couldn't find it because it was so dark.  Tragically, I had to go without music for the 1hr 15min of commuting I do each day.  Need I repeat my earlier sentiment.

Skeletons in the Closet

As much as I feel like I’m adapting to my new environment (both culturally and biologically), there are still moments when I find India to be just as raw and shocking as it seemed when I arrived here for the first time three years ago.  Now, on my second trip, blinders obscure my vision more than ever, and I normally walk by the disfigured beggars and the open sewers without skipping a beat.  I no longer pay very much attention to such mundane sights as the hunched-over sweeper women ineffectively cleaning the streets with cheap, ineffective brooms; the men urinating or defecating on the side of the road in full view of passing traffic; the people dumping piles of trash wherever they please, and then, the scavengers who come afterwards to sift through the waste; the numerous stray dogs in varying states of decline and affliction; the transvestite population who begs with a special sort of aggressiveness; the beggar woman who clutches a baby in one hand as she thrusts her other hand in your face (whose baby is it actually and why does it never cry? is it drugged?); the trash burners and the crazies and the drunks.  Though I really shouldn’t get used to all this, I suppose it is for the best because otherwise I would always be too overwhelmed to function.

Even with this defense mechanism, there is much that I cannot get used to, especially the Indian attitude to death.  It’s hard to describe this attitude because it seems so contradictory: the concept of death is at once central to India’s cultural identity with Hinduism’s focus on the cycle of reincarnation, and at the same time, death, as a state of being and not as a religious idea, feels peripheral, eliciting indifference and nonchalance.  It is this nonchalance that I find so strange.  In general, my experience has been that death in India is either simply ignored or not spoken about because it’s taboo, which as a culturally ignorant foreigner, I interpret as a form of “ignoring.”  Considering it as a reflection of the value of the individual, the indifference is more than strange – it is disturbing.

I’m not trying to say that there is no reaction to death whatsoever in India; I’ve seen relatives mourning a death in the family with great passion.  Additionally, I find it hard to explain how exactly the Indian attitude towards death differs from the Western attitude towards death.  Death (and rebirth) is just as central a concept in Christianity as it is in Hinduism, and similarly, death is easily ignored as well.  I mean, if we paid more attention to death, there might be some outcry over our continued involvement in two bloody, prolonged wars.  Maybe, the distinction is that death in India isn’t peripheral, but it’s treated as if it is.

 Almost everyday I encounter something that makes me think about this morbid topic.  Walking to work the other morning I was faced with an especially gruesome sight: the pathetic, tattered corpse of a kitten lying in rigor mortis on the sidewalk.  I nearly vomited as I stepped over the body and continued on my way, not knowing quite how to process it.  It’s not as if the kitten was road-kill, which is something I’d find more dismissable.  No, it looked like the poor creature had died of starvation as there appeared to be no external injury though it seems unlikely that a starving kitten would choose to die right in the middle of a sidewalk.  I heard another story about how residents of a quiet Bangalore neighborhood woke up one morning to discover ten dead dogs splayed out in the middle of the road.  Evidently, someone had fed them some poisoned meat, which I suppose is one way to deal with the stray dog population.

These anecdotes are not just limited to animals (really, what are a few canines when thousands and thousands of people are barely surviving?).  Walking around Bangalore, I frequently see people lying on the sidewalk who don’t exhibit any signs of life.  I don’t stop to take a pulse.  In the newspaper, you can find stories daily about some completely preventable tragedy.  A typical article tells about the five-year-old who was out playing in the street, then fell into one of the deep, open drainage ditches, and drowned in the standing water.  (If only India had the U.S.’s legal system, lawyers would have a field day with law-suits.)

 During my first week at work, an employee committed suicide by hanging himself from an electrical wire.  This occurred on the company’s campus, and the way I learned about what had happened was through rumor and hearsay.  The company didn’t give everyone a day off to conduct an investigation, didn’t send out a company-wide email to discuss the incident and their response to it, never made an official announcement of any form, and of course, nothing appeared in the newspapers.  The police didn’t show up until the following day when the deceased’s relatives arrived at the gate to demand an inquiry into the death to determine whether it might be murder.  The police didn’t assent to the request; rather they guarded the campus, preventing the upset family members from entering. 

As someone brand new to the company, I was surprised by the suicide and the company’s way of handling it, but now that I’ve been here about a month, I don’t think that this reaction is particularly unusual for India.  Although my colleagues talked about the suicide, they never demanded any action or expressed any surprise over the way the company handled it.  A few days later, it wasn’t mentioned, and taking my cue, I too put it out of my mind.

Making Flippy Floppy

            After spending most of the day picking up such essentials as curtains and incense in Bangalore’s biggest market area, which is fittingly called “Commercial Street,” my roommate, A., and I were trekking back to the house when a strap on my relatively expensive, Made-in-the-USA sandals broke.  I had actually been struggling with my sandals for a while without thinking that there might be a problem; instead, I had idiotically concluded something like “I guess I just can’t walk today.”  I didn’t give them another thought until suddenly I was barefoot.

            I picked up the sandal, looked at A., and commented, “That sucks, my sandal is broken.”

            And before he responded, an elderly Indian woman standing on the balcony above us, who neither of us had noticed, chimed in that there was a place right around the corner that could fix it.  I was a little surprised that we had been overheard, especially by someone who understood what I was saying, but gladly took her advice, loping lopsidedly in the direction she had indicated.

            We crossed the street and found the local cobbler who immediately grabbed my broken sandal and in five minutes, while we stood there, he fixed it and also reinforced the unbroken one just for good measure.  In less time than it would have taken me to pack up the sandals to ship them back to the manufacturer, which is what I would have done back in the U.S., I had a functioning pair of sandals.  And the bill, you ask?  An astounding Rs. 10, which is about $0.25, and I’m sure I was charged about twice the local rate.  A quarter!?!  That’s the price of a gumball.  Unbelievable.

            When I mentioned this to A., he remarked that “Sure, we have great access to basic services, but what happens when you get in an accident and need a high-quality hospital.  That’s the other side of the coin.”

            With that introduction, I’ll submit a very brief report on PPP in India relative to the U.S., which is a topic that oddly fascinates me.  I should really stop converting between the two currencies and just work entirely in rupees (budgets don't balance when you earn in rupees, but spend in dollars), but that process takes time.  Meanwhile, here are my observations.  For starters, food and services in India are ridiculously cheap.  Food in restaurants costs about 25% what it does in the U.S. and that is a conservative estimate.  At a fancy, high-end restaurant, you’ll pay about $4 or $5 for a main course, and at a decent place, it’ll be more like $2.  The model breaks down for street food and little hole-in-the-walls where equivalent meals in the U.S. would cost almost 10 times as much.  For example, the masala dosa I pick-up for breakfast, which is too big to finish and comes with sambar and a chutney, costs less than $0.50.  I don’t know how McDonalds or KFC make money when they are half as fast and several times more expensive than nearby local restaurants.

            Similar pricing applies to the service industry.  Just remember the cobbler.  As another example, the room I’m renting (real estate, for that matter, is somewhat more expensive than food and services though I’m still paying less than $200 a month to live in a spacious, comfortable house in one of the hottest areas of Bangalore) came with a cook/manservant named Mansingh.  I can afford a cook/manservant as a 22-year-old student because he works for a dollar a day (in total, three dollars a day counting the wages he receives from my two roommates).  Mansingh makes me breakfast and dinner, launders and irons my cloths, and cleans my room weekly.  And as long as he’s around, he’ll run out to the store and pick up whatever you want when you ask him to.  On top of all that, I really like him.  He has been gamely helping me with my non-existent Hindi and allows me into his kitchen on occasion to try my hand at making chapattis.  Eventually, he’ll interrupt my miserable attempts and tell me to eat my dinner, which is code for “let the expert take over, noob.”

            In theory, auto rickshaws should also be priced as reasonably as Mansingh is, but of course, I have to pay the paleface tax and end up getting ripped off most of the time.  I’ve started getting better at haggling and now fight in Rs. 5 (about $0.10) increments. A driver lost me as a fare this morning because I found another guy who would take Rs. 10 less.  To travel about 6 miles, I should have paid approximately $2.  Instead I paid $2.50 or so, which was much better than the initially quoted price of $4.  I think an equivalent cab ride in NYC would cost well upwards of $10.  On my last trip to India, I found arguing with the drivers exasperating and often stressful, but this time around, the same process is much less frustrating and even enjoyable at times.  It’s also been educational because for the first time in my life, I clearly understand the relationship between knowledge and power.  If you lack knowledge, the driver holds all the power.

            I don’t really understand why food (the raw ingredients) is so cheap, but restaurants and services are inexpensive because there is an oversupply of labor in India.  When I explained to my colleagues at work that one of the major reasons the Democrats were slaughtered in the midterm elections was the unemployment rate, they were astonished that 9% was considered high.  It’s an understatement that there are a lot of people in India and a lot of them need jobs.  Let’s briefly consider a restaurant.  Despite having to pay for skilled workers like cooks and waiters (remember that waiting tables in India requires impressive language skills and knowledge of food and food culture), the biggest expense reflected in your bill is the raw ingredients.  This is not the case back home.

            Incidentally, I believe that India is “cricket crazy” largely for the same reason that services are cheap.  This morning while walking around I chanced upon a large sports field filled with people playing cricket, and in the same area required for two soccer games, there were easily 50 games of cricket occurring simultaneously.  Possibly 500 people were playing on overlapping pitches where one might field a ball hit several sets of wickets away.  In a country with a surplus of people and a shortage of space, cricket makes a lot of sense.

            Anyway, droning on with my analysis of prices, we come to the section of the lecture where I discuss the exceptions to the rule that everything in India is cheaper than it is back in the U.S.  The first obvious exception is goods produced by the major international brands, which, if authentic, cost exactly the same as they do anywhere else in the world.  This applies for everything from food (think of McDonalds as a place to splurge) to clothes to electronics, which if anything, are more expensive.  The second major exception is alcohol.  One ends up paying more to buy less.  When shopping in the grocery store, the cheapest beer, Kingfisher, costs substantially more than the equivalent cheap option back home.  For wine, this is an even worse problem.  At a restaurant, the prices are much more reasonable in comparison to what they are back home, but still not something to overlook.

            Wow, I’m sorry for all that.  I can’t explain why I find price comparison so interesting.  Perhaps because buying things is one of my main modes of interaction with Indians outside of work, and therefore, it takes on some significance in my life, but now that it’s off my chest, I promise not to bring it up again.

            I’ll leave you with one short, amusing story.  The other night at the Ives party, which I’ll tell you all about it in a future post on the expat scene here, a photographer took a picture of me and two other guys who I had been talking to.  Why he was photographing us, I have no idea (well stunning good looks is a possibility I suppose), but after the photo, he came up to us, notepad in hand, and asked for our names.

            John, an American, said, “I’m John,” and the photographer jotted down “Amjon.”

            John corrected him, saying, “No, no, not Amjon.  Just John.”  And of course, the photographer wrote down, “Justjon.”  Ughh.  Lol.

My house.  Notice my roommate's sweet motorcycle.

The neighborhood cow.

I want to hold your hand

            OK, so I’m fairly certain that this is a legitimate cultural characteristic as opposed to just a stereotype: in India, two men holding hands is perfectly acceptable.  It’s a sign of friendship or brotherhood or masculine solidarity, and in fact, it would be more unusual to see a man holding a woman’s hand.  Though it’s a little strange at first, you get used it.  Homosexuality is completely taboo here though if one were homosexual, it would be pretty easy to blend in.

            I was walking into lab this morning when one of the guys who works in the chemistry stockroom comes up to me and grabs my shoulder.  There is quite a lot of touching that goes on in the lab, and despite initial reluctance, I’ve come to like it.  It’s actually a very good way of preventing accidents when you’re working in such an overcrowded space, so I’m comfortable with hand-to-shoulder contact.  But, then, his hand starts ominously migrating down my arm, and the next thing I know, he has put his hand in mine.  There I am holding hands with this guy as we walk up the stairs.  I repress a sense of discomfort and an involuntary desire to run away as we awkwardly make small talk.  He starts swinging our arms, but I can’t let go because I don’t want to offend him.  There’s no escape.  I’m putting as little effort into this hand holding as I can without being rude, but still our digits remain locked for a very long 15 seconds.  It feels like someone is holding me underwater, and when he finally releases me, I’m able to come to the surface to breath.  Just surfing, my foot.

            I’ve dramatized the story a bit, but my discomfort was quite real.  Behavior is influenced by culture to an astonishing degree.  I was repressing my discomfort to avoid being impolite because I’ve been culturally programmed to do so.  My friend, on the other hand, had no clue how I was feeling, and moreover, considered our behavior entirely normal.  My cultural fire alarm was ringing while he was likely very satisfied by/with the interaction.  As much as I try to accept that hand-holding is just a sign of friendship, I do believe that sexual repression is at the roots of behavior among Indian males that to the Western eye seems a little strange, but that is a topic for another post.  I’m still trying to get my hands on this short video that will show you exactly what I’m talking about.

            In other news, this past weekend I joined a group of nine expats (of whom four were German, three French, and two South African) and two Indians on a trip to the South Indian state of Kerala.  Our destination was the Backwaters, an interesting and unusual series of freshwater canals located near the coast city, Alleppey (nicknamed India’s Venice by Lonely Planet), which I had already visited three years ago and again will be visiting in a few weeks with my family. 

Our intrepid group made the 700 km journey by hired, overnight bus. Including the return trip, we spent a total of 30 hours on that bus, and with all twelve seats occupied, it was a very long, cramped, and uncomfortable ride indeed, marked by the pro forma death-defying encounters with oncoming traffic, the unfortunate conversion of the air conditioning into a sprinkler system, and all sorts of unpleasant smells and sounds emanating from both us and our surroundings. 

Descending the Western Ghats, we left Bangalore’s pleasant climate behind as we lost 2,000 feet in elevation traveling from the Deccan plateau to the coastal plains.  This geography explains why Kerala is so lush and beautiful – it is known throughout India as “God’s Own Country” (whether because it is like the Garden of Eden or has India’s largest Christian population, I’m not sure).

The Backwaters were satisfyingly idyllic.  After the long bus ride, we boarded a houseboat and cruised lazily along, enjoying the heat and the scenery.  A friendly set of staff cooked us a delicious Keralan lunch and dinner featuring fresh fish and prawns and the characteristic Keralan coconut oil, which many North Indians despise for its odd, almost gritty, fleshy flavor.  In the afternoon, we went canoeing and that evening a few of us took a dip in the warm waters (this is not advised considering the water’s cleanliness, but none of us developed rashes, got violently ill, or were attacked by leeches, piranhas, or sucker fish).  There isn’t really much else to say because it was so relaxing.  I’ve posted a few pictures to give you an idea of what I mean.

The following day, we were kicked off the boat at an unhappy hour and eventually made our way to the beach where I went swimming for the second time that weekend.  In the afternoon, we stopped in Cochin, Kerala’s largest city, to eat a late lunch and see a few remnants of Dutch colonialism, and then it was back on the bus.  We arrived back in Bangalore at 5:30 a.m. Monday morning, and I was on the company bus to work at 7:35 a.m.

The weekend was rushed, but I had a fine time.  I liked the group a lot and would be happy to hang out with them in the future (some of us might even be visiting Pondicherry in a couple of weekends).  On the whole, everyone was friendly and easygoing, but no one was complacent, which is always a risk once you start feeling settled in.

Not that I really feel settled in – never fear, I’m still pleasantly lost all the time.  That said, I’m happy to report that commenting on cultural and linguistic differences no longer defines my primary mode of conversation.  They are convenient go-to topics, but fortunately, my “under-construction” life has been framed, which means that conversation focuses more and more on the structural elements of life and less and less on the environmental ones.  Tonight, I plan on attending a soiree of sorts with IVES, the local Bangalore expat club, and I’m afraid that conversation will once again turn to cheap cultural and linguistic observation, but who knows? I’ll be sure to keep you all posted.

Mangodreams

             Dude, mangoes are awesome.  Unfortunately, December is the completely wrong season for mangoes, but weather be damned, the country's and my appetite cannot wait another few months for ripeness (how many months, you ask?  I can't tell you - each time I ask I get a different answer, but I have a feeling peak mango season is sometime in July).  And so, one can buy raw mangoes, i.e. unripe mangoes flavored with chili and lime, at roadside stands, which I haven't yet tried, or one can buy one of the many mango-flavored products found at every local food/beverage stand.  I'm slowly working my way through the different options.  So far, I'm totally hooked on Maaza, which is a mango-flavored beverage offered by the Coca Cola Company, containing 10% mango juice and a whole ton of real cane sugar.  Delicious.  Why Coke doesn't offer it in the States is beyond me.  And then, there are the mango hard candies with the soft syrup interiors, a perfect way to wash down a nice cold drink, like a Maaza.  Every night, I say a few words of prayer to the mango gods to speed up the ripening process.  Apples are just not adequate substitutes.