This post is inspired by a really cool discovery I made yesterday morning. I was getting dressed for work in my usual early morning daze when I found some cash in the pocket of the khakis I had just put on. Nothing too unusual in this though I was surprised by how many 10s were in there (that low domination bills are rare commodities is yet another one of those amusing/annoying things about India. You quickly learn to hoard them like everyone else after getting stiffed a few times because "No change, sir.") There was also a 100 rupee note, but something seemed funny about it. To the touch, it felt too smooth and crisp, not soft like other bills are. One look at the watermark confirmed my suspicions that it was counterfeit. Which is so awesome! I can't remember who gave it to me, but someone out there is unloading counterfeit bills and one ended up in my possession. I've decided to keep it as a souvenir, but I think I could get rid of it if I wanted to. Ethical dilemma?
So the catchy title has little to do with the main body of my post. Yes, the bill shown above is a counterfeit, and I do want to talk about the idea of culture in India now, but I don’t want to say that India’s culture is counterfeit, not that I even know what that would mean. It is true that Indian culture is experiencing rapid change as the forces of rapid economic growth, globalization, and urbanization have shaped, molded, and distorted India, and in this sense, there is a feeling of cultural flux that can be mistaken for a sort of “artificiality,” though this term is also too strong. These agents of change have had a stretching effect on Indian society, widening the gaps between the classes in such a way that India still has millions of people who continue to live like their ancestors did a few hundred years ago while on the other end of the spectrum, you have young people who could be easily mistaken for any other teenager in the developed world (including this pretty girl on my company bus who thinks she’s all that and refuses to acknowledge my unworthy existence. Just like high school!). This cultural elongation, to me, feels a little artificial or even manufactured, but change is one of the things I love about India. It is palpable here. One manifestation of this is the IT revolution whose epicenter, as Thomas Friedman noticed, is Bangalore. My city is home to some enormous cutting-edge companies, like Infosys, and for each Infosys, there are a hundred small start-ups working to overtake them.
Everyday, I interact with people from all ends of the culture spectrum. In the lab, for example, you have people who attended U.S. universities for graduate school and speak English with an American accent, and then you have people who use a Western toilet like an Indian one, squatting on top of the toilet and doing their business perched on high (I know this not because I’ve spied on them or set-up a camera or something, but because there are often footprints on the toilet seat). Some of the friendliest and warmest people I encounter are from the traditional end of the culture spectrum. The other day, I was out with my roommate buying a watermelon from a roadside stand, and the watermelon seller asked my roommate in Hindi about my foot, “What happened to the poor guy? Will he be ok? Will he lose the leg? I’m so sorry for him. Take this watermelon, it’s the sweetest one.” It was a form of sincere hospitality; as a guest in India, particularly an injured one, I was offered the best watermelon.
I find this sort of hospitality and concern very moving, but traditions can also be restrictive and repressive. Indian women, for example, struggle against highly entrenched forms of gender inequality. In traditional communities, possibly the main purpose of a girl’s education is to transform her into a suitable wife who can bear many sons. It can be hard to realize your dreams and aspirations when your family feels that doing so hurts your chances of making a respectable (arranged) marriage. Though my company is lead by a powerful, ambitious woman, the management and workforce is overwhelmingly male and, for that matter, rather sexist. At tea one day, a labmate of mine commented on a cute intern here who prefers to wear Western clothing. He said, and I’m translating roughly from the Tamil, that she would look good if she didn’t dress in such trash. I should have said something to him about it, but I didn’t.
On the other end of the culture spectrum, however, you have a generation of love marriages and love divorces. You have the liberated woman who lets the nanny raise the kids while she attends to her career. And so it goes...
I beg your forgiveness for some of the broad generalizations I’ve made in both this post and my last one. I realize that although I feel like I’ve been in India for a long time, it’s only been a couple of months, and I still am very much an outsider. These generalizations arise from my own observations, but obviously, I’ve only observed a small swath of India and don’t really know what I’m talking about. Humbly, then, I’ll conclude by relating an anecdote, which I believe stands on its own though it also serves as a good illustration of how change has affected at least one village in South India.
The other week, a friend from work who I really like and respect told me his story about growing up in a small farming village in the hills of Tamil Nadu. He happens to be an excellent storyteller, which is impressive considering that English is not his first language, but what he lacks in fluency, he makes up for in expressive gestures and effective sound effects. I mentioned to him that I was going to Madurai to see the bullfights, and his story naturally unwound from there (for this reason, I was planning to write about his story in a post called “Another slice of bulloney,” but it fits better here and avoids the necessity of making such a bad pun).
He told me that in his village they used to have bull races every couple of years. A pair of bulls would be harnessed to a sort of chariot upon which two men stand, a driver and a man whose sole purpose is to get the bulls moving at top speed. When the starting gun would go off, the ignition man would apply an electric shock to the bulls, literally jumpstarting them. Then, he would take out an umbrella and open and close it very rapidly behind the bulls to frighten them into maintaining the pace (at this point, my friend mimed the process of rapidly opening and closing an umbrella with the appropriate sound effects… hilarious). Meanwhile, the driver would do his best to keep the two bulls working together and prevent the chariot from careening off course.
The ten surrounding villages would all enter a pair of bulls into the race. Huge build-up anticipated the race, and the betting would start a year in advance. Whichever team won the race would bring glory to their village and would be recognized as champions until the next race two years later. Bulls would be raised from birth for the sole purpose of racing. Children would train them to run, at first pulling the animal behind them to induce it into a trot, but eventually, as the calf got older, it was the bull that ended up pulling the children. My friend told me that a bull once dragged his brother through the dirt across an entire field to the immense amusement of all spectators. When the bull became strong enough, he was harnessed to the chariot and broken to the yoke. As important as it was that a bull was strong and fast, it was almost more important that it could work well with another bull. Teamwork, teamwork, teamwork. When it came time to place bets, all these variables had to be taken into consideration.
My friend managed to evoke vibrant scenes in my imagination: the crowds cheering from rickety wooden stands as twenty adorned and decorated bulls thundered down a field of dirt, throwing clods of earth into the air, while drivers frantically shouted commands and the ignition men opened and closed their umbrellas when they weren’t using a couple of wires and a car battery to apply a shock to the animals’ flanks; one chariot breaking down, plummeting into the loose soil and splintering into a thousand pieces, the men flying off in a heap and a wooden wheel rolling off into the distance before slowing down and spinning to the ground like a dying top; the finish line where garlands of flowers have been strung, and judges clad in white wave signal flags like semaphore, and a commentator yells an unending stream of who-knows-what into the barely-working, crackling, and, above all, loud sound system; and once the race is over the celebrations of the victorious village and the ensuing, energetic debates over the validity of the win all under a hot sun and a cloudless, blue sky with coconut trees, green crops, and hazy hills in the background.
As my friend warmed to the subject, he told me about how as a five-year-old, he was sent to live with his grandparents because his parents’ home did not have enough room after a recent addition to his family. To run errands or visit his family, he and his grandfather would climb aboard a similar chariot to the one described above, except instead of two racing-bulls at the harness, a slow, old plow-bull pulled them along at a pace slower than a walk. To escape the brutal sun, his grandfather would wrap a shawl around my friend’s head because umbrellas were not allowed near the bulls for obvious reasons. They would glide proudly and slowly across the landscape, time trickling away as it had always done, the pace of life commensurate with the pace of the bull.
Only twenty years ago, this was how my friend remembered life in his village. Then, as has happened in farming communities around the world, modern agricultural technologies and market pressures entered the picture, and things would never be the same. Bicycles, motorcycles, and rickshaws superseded the bull chariot as transportation. The tractor replaced the plow. Synthetic, petroleum fertilizers substituted for manure. The bull races stopped happening altogether.
Now my friend’s village is very poor, which is why he is working at a pharmaceuticals company instead of in the fields like his ancestors. After a brief boom during the first two years after the introduction of pesticides and fertilizers, the soil was destroyed, and more and more fertilizer had to be applied to achieve the same results, creating a spiral of rising expenses and reduced productivity at the cost of the health of the fields. The new, marketable crops the farmers were encouraged to plant required more water, and the irrigation systems were not able to handle the increased demand. Now drought is a major problem. There seems to be little hope in the village, which is fuelling rapid urbanization.
It’s a story about change and how difficult it can be. How it leaves some people behind. How the pace of change is so fast in some places that it’s bewildering. This process must have occurred in all developed countries, but I think in India it may have occurred more rapidly because the new technologies were deployed all at once instead of introduced gradually as they were developed. This accelerated pace of change is what has stretched Indian society. Some caught the wave while others did not.
By the end of the story, his tone had become subdued and reflective. I found the story to be affecting, and I was honored that he had shared it with me. It has lost a lot in the retelling, and I’ve filled it out a bit with my own understanding and imagination, so it is not 100% trustworthy, but we all know what a reliable narrator I am.
