Leaving Kolkata

It’s now just two weeks and one day before I head back to the US. I’ve finished all my work with Vikramshila, and said goodbye to the kids at the school. Having begun the process of leaving, I’m kind of ready to go. But there is a little more to do yet. I fly to Delhi tomorrow. From there I'm going to Rajasthan. While I hope to post a couple more times, this ends the regular onslaught of blogging.

I could not have planned a better trip. My accomodation with the Chatterjees let me inside the life of an Indian family, while providing me with more freedom than I would have had on a typical abroad program. Plus, I got home-cooked Indian food as frequently as I wanted it. My job involved doing primary research on topics that I find fascinating, and which may end up being relevant to what I do after I graduate. As an added bonus, Vikramshila is an organization that I actually believe in, which is something of a rarity in the development world. I had conversations with dozens of people I’ll never see again, and I became close with KP and Shubhra, two extremely warm and devastatingly intelligent women. Furthermore, the job had me travel all over West Bengal, conducting interviews with teachers, students, and farmers. I should emphasize how unreasonably nice to me the folks at Vikramshila have been: unreasonably nice.

I envied at times the group of Irish volunteers who invited me out for drinks a couple of times—hikings through Sikkim during the monsoon is probably more fun with a buddy or two—but their program involved fairly little involvement with the city on its own terms, and limited personal interaction with people who live here. Being more or less on my own in Kolkata gave me a sense of what it might be like to think of Jodphur Park as home.

And writing this blog and reading all the great comments from people back home (some of whom I don’t even know) has been a great way to process this summer—I would never have been as prolific or organized if I had been keeping a private journal. I was always looking for interesting things to write about, and was perpetually thinking about how my observations and generalizations might come off to someone reading about them on the web, which led me to think critically not only about what I saw, but how I was interpreting it—you people kept me on my toes. Thanks.

K-tick and Pujie asked me a few posts back about why I got interested in India to begin with. I kind of like the idea of concluding this blog with an introduction of sorts.

It would be romantic to say that I’ve always been interested in India. While I did do my second grade country project on Asian elephats and Bengal tigers and the Taj Mahal, that doesn’t exactly consitute a life-long curiousity. And my decision to come here certainly wasn’t inspired by a spiritual awakening or something.

It basically comes down to this; last summer’s exciting office job left me feeling pretty claustrophobic being home in Northern Virginia: and I vowed, there in the scanning room, that I wouldn’t sit around for another 4 months, doing nothing but waiting for school to start up again. I looked around for an internship in Latin America, but nothing popped up. Finally, I asked a professor at Earlham where he thought I should go for the summer, for the dual purposes of travel and personal edification. He mentioned that he was the president of Vikramshila (which I had of course never heard of) and would I like to work with them?

So the decision to go io India was in fact somewhat ad hoc, but I knew enough to be fascinated at the mere suggestion. India is so big, with such a huge a rapidly growing population; it might be on the verge of meaningful economic progress; it has an epic and expansive living history; my Quaker upbringing impressed upon me a deep respect for the pascifist principles of Gandhi; and I was already in love with the food. Every other case study in economics is from Indian, and my coursework has been India-centric thanks to my two Indian professors, Raja and Atindra. After some vague e-mailing in which I was vaguely assued I’d have a room to rent, I took the plunge, and bought the plane ticket. (Well, my mommy bought the plane ticket. But she was more or less compensated later thanks to a grant from the Plowshares people at the Lilly Foundation.) Excited for the trip, I started to read obsessively, and even but in a fair but ultimately futile effort at picking up Bengali.

Upon arrival, too, the numerous parallels between the US and India immediately sucked me in. Caste in India is treated similarly to race in my home country. Both nations suffer from prominent political parties that are alligned with religious fundamentalists, although India had the good sense to throw their’s out of the majority after one terrible term. Both are dealing with Islamic-fundamentalist terrorism. India is so different and so the same from where I come from; how could I not be intrigued?

But the moments that have been the most astonishing have nothing to do with the nation’s political climate nor its turbulent history. I am regularly amazed just walking to work, seeing the amount and intensity of human activity; the haggling salesmen, the owners of tea stalls, the beggars, conversations flying by in half-a-dozen languagesthe tiny sidewalk temples where people offer puja and burn incense as the mass of pedestrians wander by. Some days, upon considering the plight of Kolkata’s poor, I wonder how the city survives from day to day: but under closer inspection, it’s the persistence and adaptability of people that is the norm here, and desperation and hopelessness the exception. Some days, I want to run up to people in the street and ask, “Do you see how amazing this all is?”

“The Death and Life of Great American Cities” is one part interdisciplinary treatise against modern urban planning, and one part love poem to New York—Jacob’s New York, where she grew up, and which provided her with a world to explore and thousands of people to inspire her. She writes (and I’m paraphrasing here, but just barely), “There is a quality worse than ugliness, and that quality is imposed order, which strangles the real order underneath that is trying to make itself known.” To Jacobs, the daily routine of New York or Kolkata is a ballet, in which the dancers perform entirely independent and perfectly complimentary roles. You could never design something like this, and when people try, they end up with something superficial or worse.

Kolkata has so much character—that collection of peculiarities that bind 15 million people by more than just geography. There are all of the knick-knacks that hang from the bumpers of buses and autorickshaws (a pair of sandals, a garland of limes and green chiles) put there allgedly to keep away the evil eye. There are the extremely creative billboard advertising campaigns that build suspense for weeks before revealing their product. There’s the nerdy Bengali culture, which provides the foundation for the sprawling book market on College St. and which ensures that everybody, from school children to rickshaw drivers, knows who Satyajit Ray is. There’s the remarkable ambivalence to the city’s British heritage, which gave Kolkata its architectural flair and gave West Bengal the terrible famine of 1943 which killed two million people. And there’s the cynical leftist political attitude, disallusioned with Communist rule, but committed to the sickle and hammer by habit if nothing else. Everyday, a small group of workers will beat a drum and march around for a couple of hours, just to show who’s boss.

I’m sure that people will ask me when I get home, “How did you like India?” It seems like a tricky question to answer. Whenever I hear people complian that they hate it here, for one reason or another (it hasn’t happened frequently), I feel like telling them that nobody gave them permission to hate the place, to pass judgment on it in that way. And similarly, I’m not sure a foreigner can say, “I love Kolkata!” without sounding arrogant. Loving or hating a place somehow assumes a knowledge of it, a knowledge that is comprehensive and provides the basis for a judgment. This is how too many Westerners have approached the East.

I can say this: Kolkata was good to me, and I met a lot of wonderful people. It taught me a lot, and it gave me a lot to write about. That has to say something.

I'm excited for my last round of sightseeing, but I'm also excited to come home, and see the Northern Virginia crew, and eat a Dos Manos.

You stay classy, the internet.