What's a good blog without some self-depracating anecdotes? (or, a confession)

Those of you who know me are aware that, sometimes, I lose my temper. As Mr. Daniel David Crabtree once said, “Sam can huff and puff with the best of them.” True enough. And while I maintain that I actually huffed and puffed very little in the tale I put forth below, I admit that a more serene person would have acted differently.

On Monday I’ll be traveling west a few hours to the village of Bigha, where Vikramshila has helped run a school. My assignment is to document how the school has become a centre of community life—how the children monitor the health and pH of the pond, and care for it accordingly; how a geology project led to the farmers deciding to adopt organic agricultural practices; how older boys who dropped out of school have formed a group to discuss newspaper articles. It sounds like a fantastic experiment, and one that should be modeled elsewhere.

When Shubhradi, the director of Vikramshila, was making the preliminary arrangements for my trip, she discovered that the police in Bigha actually want foreign tourists to register when they visit the countryside. The presence of an ISS camp in the district compounded their worries.(ISS is the Pakistani version of the CIA, which fans the flames of communal discontent). They asked that I come down to the Tourist Registration office on Thursday afternoon this week to see about getting the necessary paperwork.

On Thursday morning, I was attending a conference of an NGO at the five-star Taj Bengal hotel. Shubhradi wanted me to come for a few hours to steal their delicious food and listen to the big wigs of the “aid business” describe the dire needs of the poor. Irony at its finest. When the time came, Kanupriya walked meto the front desk and asked the bellboy to call me a cab. He said sure, and KanuPriya went back into the meeting. A few minutes later, the bellboy told me to stand out front. A few minutes after than, when no car had come, he pointed me to the busy road out front, and told me to walk out there and call a cab myself. I rolled my eyes, and walked out the ornate gates of the Taj Bengal.

Once on the road, I approached an idling cab, and told the driver where I wanted to go. He avoided my eyes and said, rather forcefully, “No,” while beckoning to another man walking up behind me on the sidewalk. After walking down the road for a few minutes, I finally managed to find a willing driver. When he dropped me off, he pulled the standard Kolkata cab driver trick of insisting he didn’t have any change. In a rush, I didn’t have time to protest, so I over-paid and got out.

Sutapadi, who I worked on a report with for a good long while, was waiting for me at the Tourist Registration office. We walked into the building, and had a seat at a table just outside the glass partitions that separate the office’s employees from its customers. The woman across the table said hello to me, and knew enough English to ask me to see my passport, and why I was in the country, and when I would be leaving. She was a smallish woman, maybe 50 years old, with glasses and the grim, serious expression all too common amongst bureaucrats. She then started speaking rapidly in Bengali to Sutapadi. I understood enough to know that she was saying that in any town I visited in India, in every neighborhood I stayed in, I was to report to the local police station, to give them my location and my living situation, as well as a vague itinerary. This, to me, was starting to sound like a big hassle, and one that I had done without for 5 weeks. It was also starting to sound weird—why hadn’t the State Department website mentioned this to me, nor the customs people when I arrived?

I promise to record the conversation I had with the woman across the table with as much accuracy as I can muster. I also promise that my tone was courteous, and my volume normal. Later, Shubhradi asked me if my body language was threatening. I don't really remember too well, but I think not. Assertive, I think, but calm.

I leaned forward in my seat.

“Is this voluntary or is this something I need to do?” I asked.

“It’s the rule,” she replied.

“So it’s the law?”

“It’s the rule.”

“Can you tell me why you want this information?”

This, as I was assured later, was not a good question to ask.

“Don’t ask me why, it’s the rule.” Sutapadi, my companion, began waving her hand at me, and saying, in a half-yell, “Calm down, calm down!”

“I’m perfectly calm, thank you,” I said to her.

“Don’t ask me why,” the woman across the counter said, and started repeating it, and speaking loudly in Bengali to her superior across the room, who looked up blankly, and then went back to what he had been doing. The woman across the table continued this rant, gesturing pointedly with my passport, until she finally decided she should give me some sort of answer, but she addressed it to Sutapadi in a completely dismissive tone.

“Well, what if you [something in Bengali I didn’t catch] abducted? Police need to know.”

“So it’s for my own good?” The woman started saying, “Don’t ask me why,” again, and yelling to the guy across the room. It was obvious that I needed to back off or I wasn’t going to learn anything.

“Ok, now, I’m ok giving you this information. I will give you the information. I just want to know what you’re going to do with it," I said, in a tone of renewed reasonableness.

“Don’t ask me why.”

“I’m not asking you why, I’m just asking you how this system works.” She began talking to everyone but me, repeating her trademark phrase. Sutapadi continued encouraging me to calm down. I had had about enough of the interaction. A minute passed without me saying anything. Finally, she put down my passport. I picked it up and quietly put it in my backpack.

“Sutapadi, do we need anything else here?”

“Calm down, calm down.” I was feeling pretty frustrated at this point. I also knew what this woman wanted me to do, and since it was going to require a return trip anyway, I figured there wasn’t much point in hanging around. I stood up.

“Sutapadi, I’m going back to the Taj Bengal, OK?” She said “OK, fine,” and I walked out of the building.

(As a side note, it turns out that Sutapadi actually hadn’t been listening to me, and thought I was going to wait for her in the lobby or something.)

The only real outcome of this whole thing is that it has provided endless entertainment to the folks in the office. Shubhradi says she’s glad to finally have seen me “act my age,” as it was the first time I came anywhere close to losing my cool since I’ve been here.

Everyone was pretty perplexed that this interaction had frustrated me. “It’s the government!” people have been saying. “You’re not supposed to know why! You just wait for them to tell you what to do, and then you do it. You Americans!” I’m a little reluctant to write the whole thing off as a lesson in comparative politics, since I imagine that the folks back home will also be a little surprised that I didn’t do the calm, practical thing—smile and nod, do whatever she said. This is good advice, and advice which I'm sure a few of my readers (Hi Mom!) will send me via e-mail upon reading this post. All I can say is that it was one of those moments where you have an emotional reaction that you'd rather not have, but there's not anything you can do about it. Every bone in my body told me, "leave."

The end of the story is that I’m going to register with the police in the village where I’m going. But nobody here at the office thinks I actually need to register with the police in my neighborhood, ha ha, and isn’t the government funny?

In case it's not obvious from the tone of this post, I feel pretty conflicted about the whole event. On the one hand, I feel that the woman really was behaving irrationally and disrespectfully. I have a hard time imagining that I'd feel provoked if I and the woman acorss the table were to switch places. On the other hand, I feel embarassed, as I always do, about losing my temper. Whenever such things happen to me, I always end up feeling like I have a little less control over the enigmatic Self than I'd like to admit.