The new British Airways luggage policy as a result of the intercepted terrorist attack

[my flight leaves tomorrow morning]

"Passengers may take through the airport security search point, in a single (ideally transparent) plastic carrier bag, only the following items. Nothing may be carried in pockets:-

pocket size wallets and pocket size purses plus contents (for example money, credit cards, identity cards etc (not handbags));
travel documents essential for the journey (for example passports and travel tickets);
prescription medicines and medical items sufficient and essential for the flight (eg diabetic kit), except in liquid form unless verified as authentic.
spectacles and sunglasses, without cases.
contact lens holders, without bottles of solution.
for those travelling with an infant: baby food, milk (the contents of each bottle must be tasted by the accompanying passenger) and sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight (nappies, wipes, creams and nappy disposal bags).
female sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight, if unboxed (eg tampons, pads, towels and wipes).
tissues (unboxed) and/or handkerchiefs
keys (but no electrical key fobs)

Every other item must be carried in customer’s hold luggage.

For clarity, passengers are advised that no electrical or battery powered items including laptops, mobile phones, portable music players, remote controls etc can be carried in the cabin and must be checked in as hold baggage.


All passengers must be hand searched, and their footwear and all the items they are carrying must be x-ray screened.

Pushchairs and walking aids must be x-ray screened, and only airport-provided wheelchairs may pass through the screening point."

Sounds like it's gonna be a long journey home.

India v Pakistan: The High-Kicking Championships

Every night, on the Indo-Pak border, just west of Amritsar, thousands of people gather to watch the closing of the border ceremony. Catie and I went, along with an Israeli fellow named Ido and a Finnish fellow named Olli, who I ended up traveling with for a few days. The crowd gathers outside the gates to the complex until 6:30, when the Indian troops usher people down a cement path that runs around the military buildings and along the border. Then, the people take their seats in the bleachers.

Catie and I agreed that when we had been picturing the border, we had imagined something like the Oakton High School football field, except on a dusty plain and with a barbed wire fence running down the middle. Instead, the grass is well-cut, the trees are luscious, the buildings are well-maintained, and there is no trash on the ground. In short, it is like nowhere else I've been in India. The landscape is deep green, the sky is a gorgeous pastel blue, and the signs of poverty, prevalent and intense all the way from Amritsar, are tucked neatly out of sight.

Our group of white people sits in the VIP section with all the other white people and foreign-resident or well-connected Indians. Then, a thin, good looking man with a healthy mustache starts warming up the crowd, like a stand-up comic before the taping of a sit-com (he's actually the same guy they use for "Life with the Chatterjees"). He encourages drunken Indian men to dance spastically, and leads various cheers in Hindi, brandishing his microphone proudly. "Hindustan! Hindustan!" the crowd chants with him. Loud Hindi pop-songs blare from the speakers.

A few hundred meters away, on the other side, the Pakistani crowd is doing more or less exactly the same thing. I couldn't see too well, because the setting sun was in my eyes.

"Pakistan really has better seats for this," I said to Ido.
"Yeah, but you know they switch sides every night," he replied.


The next item on the agenda (on both sides of the border, which as you may recall, is kinda disputed in some places) was the running of the flags. Lucky contestants from the stands were brought down to the road, two at a time, and handed huge Indian and Pakistani flags, which with they sprinted all the way to the gates and back to the cheers of their respective sides. This went on for a half an hour or so. More music and dancing followed.

Then, finally, the main even; Indian troops step out from behind the barracks, fully uniformed; the tall, thin men wear an Indian head-wrap of their choice, with a peacock feather-flourish of red and gold accenting their height. Their tan military suits are freshly pressed, and white flares extend down from the bottoms of their pants to their shoes.

Catie pointed out that all the soldiers seemed to have very long legs. Do they stand on platforms beneath the white flares? We were unable to discern. In any case, when the soldiers start marching triple time toward the border, with fierce expressions and bold stature, arms swinging widely. Their high kicks, which sent their shiny black boots all the way up to their foreheads, are made extremely impressive by the length of their gangly lower appendages.

And then, we see through the gate the Pakistani soldiers marching up to meet them. The Pakistani soldiers are dressed exactly like the Indian soldiers except with darker uniforms, and green and white plumes in their headdresses rather than red and yellow ones. The crowd is going nuts at this display of their nation's greatness. Men in the crowd occasionally start up the cheers, and they are echoed around the bleachers by people waving their 5 rupee Indian flags and wearing their 5 rupee Indian flag visors.

Finally, the culmination: two flags billow atop identically tall flag poles. A soldier on each side begins the torturously slow process of bringing down the flags, inch by inch, such that neither flag ever has an advantage over the other. The lotus and crescent creep towards the earth, as the enthusiastic Indians, and enthusiastic Pakistanis, and baffled foreigners, watch. Then, everyone gets up to leave. Some people press against the gate to get a glimpse of the other side, but most file out, wading through the crowd of vendors selling DVDs of the border ceremony highlights, popcorn, and beer.

The whole thing felt like a cross between a day time talk show and a military ceremony. This cross seriously freaks me out, but making militarism more palatable via good marketing is all too common. Military recruitment propaganda is the US is bizarre and misleading, and dressed up the horrors of war in supposed virtues: courage, masculinity. And, furthermore, attempts to generate patriotism in the US tend to be attempts to produce support for military operations. By playing strongly upon one part of a person's identity, people in power can induce populations to violence based on a supposed difference. (This is the thesis of Amartya Sen's aptly named "Identity and Violence," and a theme dealt with by the fantastic "War is a Force that Gives us Meaning.")

At the border closing ceremony, the links between identity, patriotism, and militarism were bluntly on display. “Come cheer for your India and feel proud of its army as it faces off with the army of Pakistan, the Enemy, the Other!” The atmosphere of the ordeal wasn't tense; the soldiers weren’t about to start shooting. At one point, the gates swung open, and an Indian soldier and a Pakistani one actually shook hands. But, sitting on different sides of a line on a map, cheering for their respective militaries, were groups of people from two different that easily could have been one. This division is one that has killed people, and continues to do so--why are we celebrating it?

"Do you think it's weird that Pakistan and India can agree on the uniforms and ritual for this border closing ceremony, but that they're occasionally on the brink of nuclear war?" Catie asked. I think the reason for this total absurdity is that it benefits the people in power to reinforce borders (geographical and cultural) in the imagination of the electorate (or non-electorate, in the case of Pakistan). Then it's easier to get people to do horrible crazy things to another group of people if the occasion calls for it.

Go ahead. Repress human sexuality. You see what happens.

One of the things Westerners notice first upon arriving in India is that there seems to be a whole lot of gay men walking around. Eventually, usually pretty quickly, someone tells them that actually affection between males (in the form of hand holding and lounging over one another like puppy dogs) is a common sign of nonsexual friendship.

I have to admit that I figured this out on my own pretty fast. I saw men being physically affectionate, and thought, "Are those guys gay?" But that thought was quickly followed by, "I'm pretty sure India is a conservative country when it comes to sexuality; that's probably platonic behavior." Other Westerners have a harder time with it. Even white people who are accepting of homosexuality just can't believe that such touching isn't really an expression of repressed sexual desire.

"Some of them have to be gay," my friend Eliza said in Mcleod Gunj. Statistically, she's right; but they're certainly no more gay than a bunch of guys in a football team locker room (and probably way less so.) It's really just the way it is.

This isn't to say that there aren't sexually repressed or sexually deviant people in India. But from what I've seen, people find ways to excercise their identities in completely different ways than in the West.

A prime example is the Hijra, or transgendered, community. Hijras have a recorded history of 4,000 years, and in some parts of India were valued for their 'third-gender" status. Today, though, Hijras are among the worst-off in India, in part because so many come from the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Hijras suffer violence in public and private spaces, are commonly completely rejected by their families, and experience police brutality. Often, the only form of employment open to Hijras is as sex workers, and even there they are placed at the bottom of the hierarchy, stripped of the ability to negotiate with their employers for higher wages, or with clients for the use of contraceptives. Human rights groups have started taking notice of the problems facing Hijras, but they seriously need to get on the ball.

I actually don't know too much about transgender issues in India, in terms of the role of Hijras in Indian antiquity; but what I have encountered is the common response to Hijras. First of all; people don't talk about it. I didn't spend all that much time travelling in my first few months in India, and when I did, Vikramshila was paying for me to ride in the AC compartments. The whole time, these folks simply weren't mentioned, despite the fact that they form a immovable part of Indian society.

But having spent a fair amount of time in second class trains in the last couple of weeks (which is making me a little loopy, so be forewarned) I've run into a number of Hijras. A rumor I heard: one of the ways Hijras make money is by showing up at places (public transportation and weddings are favorites) and demanding money. People tend to pay up, since Hijras are considered bad luck. The first time I ran into one of these people, I was totally clueless. A woman in a saree comes walking up on the train and begins yelling and clapping at me. For a moment, I thought she was collecting tickets, but that seemed not to be the case. After she left in a huff, one of the over-friendly guys oogling over Catie said "She is a man." Catie and I were very surprised, and spent the next few minutes trying to figure out if our informant was truthful. It seems that he was.

It fascinates me that a group of people can be so public and yet be so invisible in the public eye.

A similar phenomenon involves homosexulaity. I asked Amrita, one of the friendly liberal Vikramshila ladies, about the status of homosexuality in India. She said that India is a fairly repressive society. Although male homosexual sex is illegal, while lesbian sex is not, a woman taking a woman as her lover is considered the more serious offence in mainstream society. Furthermore, men have a way around the societal restriction. It's fairly common, Amrita told me, for a man to ask his wife to sleep with the children so that he might share his bed with a visiting male friend. This is usually platonic; but, she believes (and I've heard this corroborated by other Indians) that this provides the occasion for guys to do it on the dl. Again: a common practice, hidden in plain sight.

****

A couple of final anecdotes about sexuality in India (of which, really, I have no experience). As a Westerner, people assume that I am a person with extremely liberal notions about sex and what have you. In my case this is completely correct, although not in the ways they might think.

Example number 1; sitting on the train today, just after a Hijra walked by demanding money, I had the following conversation with the guy next to me:

Him: Your country?
Me: America.
Him (longish pause): You have many gays in America, yes?
Me (amused, perplexed): Yeah. I mean, some. The correct amount, I'd say.
Him: And you are gay?
Me (abandoning any hope of a rational conversation): No.
Him: But you approve of gay activity?
Me (wonderng if 'gay activity' means what I think it means, but deciding to play stupid): I have gay friends, and they are great, but mostly I don't care one way or another.

Something about me being a white guy made him think it was ok to strike up an extremely personal conversation about sexuality, which I'm fairly sure he wouldn't have done with a Indian person. The only reason I wasn't offended is because I decided not to take him seriously.

But being white is apparently more than an inducement to Indian men to talk about sex. Consider:

I was standing in the lobby of the Hotel Samarat in Mushirabad back in late June when a short, bald, well-groomed Indian man approached me to ask for my name and room number. The whole thing happened so fast that I didn't have the time nor energy to decide to lie.
Consequently, at around 10:30 PM, this man shows up at my door. I was wathcing a movie ("Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," if you must know) and swithced of the TV to invite him in. Upon sitting in the chair adjacent the door, he implored me to make my self comfortable, and forcably grabbed my wrist and pulled me over to sit across from him on the bed. This was awkward.

More awkward was the fact that he spoke very little English. He told me about his job (something involving exports and the Indian government) and that about exhausted his knowledge of English. He rattled off the names of half a dozen Indian languages, of which I have no knowledge, and regretfully informed him of such. I sat quietly, trying to figure out what was going on. He invited me down to the hotel bar for a drink; I said no thank you.

At this point, I imagine retrospectively, this fellow was struck with the fear that I didn't understand why he was there.

"Just 20, 30 minutes, talking, OK? No problem?" he asked. "Happy jolly?"
I said, "No problem," though I had no idea what he was talking about.
"20, 30 minutes happy jolly, OK?" he asked. I begin to feel distinctly weirded out.

It's one thing to talk for a while with a person who wants to know about America, or to tell you what he knows about America. It's altogether different to sit in a room with a man who only occasionally asks, with desperate seriousness, "No problem? Happy jolly? 20, 30 minutes?"

Eventually, I concluded that this interaction, if it could be called such, was benefiting neither party: and, after garnering sufficient confidence, I stood up, arms folded, and said, slowly, such that he might understand, "Well, I'm going to go to bed. I think you should leave. Thank you for coming."

I can only imagine his thought process, but this seems close: he thought, "crap, I think this American kid doesn't quite understand what I'm selling."

"No problem?" he aksed.
"No, no problem, but I'm going to bed."

He then took the back of his hand and casually ran it up my crotch. I stepped back a bit.

"I'm going to bed, I think you should leave." "Was that an accident?" I wondered. "Did he think that was an accident?" he wondered. Once again, he pressed the back of his hand against my penis. This time, however, sure that I understood his nonverbal proposal, and sure that I was rejecting it, he made a beeline for the door, claiming, "I come back tomorrow," a statement which proved untrue.

After a few confused seconds, I began laughing. The poor guy: to be so repressed that you pounce on the first white guy you see on the off chance that he's gay. What a small life!

When I told Shubhas, she apologized profusely for putting me in that situtation. I told her it wasn't her fault; she said that, had I told her while we were at the hotel, she could have sent Atanu to rough the fellow up a little. I said I wanted none of that, but she remained shocked.

Being a Westerner, I've been privy to some elements of hidden Indian sexuality that I might not have been had I been an Indian. I don't really know enough about how sex works here to offer any generalizations, no matter how tentative, but I have received confirmation of my mother's thesis that human sexuality is both completely unpredictable and totally unstoppale. Only the fiercest fascist can strip a person of his or her sex drive; and transgendered people, considered aberrations in every civilization, are actually fairly universal across cultures. I suppose it's fascinating to see how differently a culture can deal with and interpret the same, seemingly simple sexual side of humanity.

Ruining a Perfectly Good Piece of Mindless Entertainment Via Feminist Criticism Is Kind of My Thing

Here's the most important thing to know about the movie Krrish, ie the Indian Superman; Catie and I watched it, in Hindi, with no subtitles, and knew exactly what was going on the entire time. Actually, the scenes with a little bit of English--like the villian claiming, "I will become God!"--were the most confusing, because it meant I had to focus on the dialogue. Most of the time, I could ignore the speaking altogether.

Catie and I had a day to kill in Delhi before she headed back to the US of A, and before I took the night train to Jodphur, Rajasthan, where I write currently. So we trucked over to Connaught Place, luggage in hand, to the Regal Theatre, to catch the movie that has done several times better than Superman. A plot summary seems sort of superfluous, but here goes: Krisna is a boy genius and wonder athlete who has to rescue his woman a bunch of times on the way to eventually rescuing his long-lost father. At some point, he adopts a secret identity (Krrish) for no particular reason. Also, there are some great song and dance numbers, though far fewer than the one-song-every-seven-minutes Bollywood average.

This was only my second Bollywood experience, but it's pretty clear from what I've seen and read how these things work--lots of splash and romance, shady use of gender, and ready-to-use archetypical characters (the loving mother, the helpless girlfriend, the questing main man) and nonsense plot. In May You Be the Mother of 100 Sons, Bumiller quotes an Indian film critic saying that the difference between Bollywood movies and Hollywood movies is that "Hollywood movies make sense."

It was really fun listening to the sparse audience respond to the film. The biggests outbursts occurred when:
1. A chimpanzee threw a bananna at a woman's butt.
2. The lead woman trips and falls into Krishna's bulging arms for the first time.

Caite and I came in looking to laugh and enoy the absurdity of Bollywood at its best, and we did--shots of a wild stallion galloping across a Himalayan pasture under a horizon to horizon raindow were too much for our cynicized eyes.

One neat thing about Bollywood films (well, Krrish anyway) is that the films make so little sens in terms of the sequence of events that you get to watch a different kind of logic unfold, free from the fetters of plot. A great example in Krrish: the leading couple is walking in a waterpark (for no reason except that this way you can show lots of white women and Singaporean women walking around in bikinis) when, at the top of a tower (?) the woman somehow slips and begins to fall backwards. Luckily, Krishna catches her hand, who continues saying romantic things to her in his sweet and playful voice as the woman, Priya, hangs, caught between a man and death. only his strength and wisdom can save her. And the only thing that keeps people from saying, "wait, why are they at the top of the tower again? and what does this have to do with anything?" is that this kind of logic is what drives Bollywood movies. This movie uses archtypes as placeholders which the audience can latch onto in lieu of any actualy sense.

****

I walked around a couple of big tourist plots with Catie this last week, in Amritsar (the seat of Sikhdom, and home of the Golden Temple) and Mcleod Gunj (the residence of the Dalai Lama in exile.) Neither of us have een come close to being physically assaulted or robbed in India--I haven't heard of anyone who has, actually--but Catie said she was glad to have a male person to wander with.

Let me be clear; Catie is no wimp. But having me around helped filter our some of the men who lik to stare at white women on trains, or offer thier phone numbers after 15 seconds of conversation. Often at touristy spots, Indian tourists like to have their photo taken with white people. That's ok, if a bit awkward--but when it's a group of young men taking their photo with an American woman, things are decidedly weird. First, touching Indian women is distinctly taboo, so you get the feeling that these guys think they're getting away with something when they put their arm around an white woman. Second, as an Indina fellow named Anil, who runs tours in Mcleod Gunj, told us, often young men will tel their buddies that they slpet with the woman in the photo, a cliam made credible by the physical proximity of the two in the shot. The whole ritual has an air of fully clothed, cadid pornography.

We ran into some women travelers who told us stories of their run-ins with bad-news Indian men. Two British ladies, Katie and Lauren, told us about a drive-by-groping in Delhi. Eliza from the States told us my favorite story.

She had just checked into a hotel in Mumbai, and was checking her e-mail, when a well-dressed middle aged man sat down and strikes up a conversation. Turns out, he owns the hotel, and a handful of other businesses in town. Somehow (she's not sure how) he lured her next door to one of this jewlerly places, where he gifted her with an $800 gold and diamond necklace.

"He kept saying really nice things about how I look, how kind I am," Eliza told us. "Eventually, his limo pulls up, and he asks if I want a tour of the city. I'm thinknig, 'oh god, I'm going to be kidnapped and sold into slavery,' but I didn't know hot to get out of it, beause I felt obligated because of the earrings."
"You took the earrings?" we all asked, astonsiehd.
"Yeah. So then we're driving around Mumbai, and he's giving me a tour--"
"You got into the limo?" we cried out.

I can hardly believe how stupid that was--but on another level, most travellers at one time or another accept the hospitality of a stranger in part because we'd like to not give offence.

Eliza's day continued with a meal at a 5-star restauraunt, and several thousand dollars worth of designer clothes.

"He gave me an Armani dress," she laments. We can't believe she accepted all the stuff, but she says that she couldn't help it--he was being to earnest and uncompromsiign in his offerings. Finally, Eliza played sick and managed to get back to her hotel room alone, where she promptly called her mom.

"First of all, Eliza, you're a fucking idiot," mom said in Castilliano. Eliza agreed to leave all of the gifts in the room and check out immediately. It was 5AM in the nearby McDonalds until friends from the suburbs came to pick her up.

"I just didn't want to feel like I owed him anything in any say," she says, explaining her traumatic parting with the beautiful things.

(Later, she tells us that she kept the earrings to give to her mom. "Won't she be mad that you kept them?" we asked. "I'll just say I got a really good deal," she replies. I'll say.)

Part of this stry is the tale of a pathetic wealthy man looking for love. But it also involves the Indian fascination with white women, and the attempt to make a woman dependent on a man so she'll need him, lik Priya clinging to Krrish as she hangs above the waterpark and certain doom.

But if the choice for women is between men and death, it shoudl be recognized that death is a man too--all the troubles that women travellers (and men travellers too, for that matter) I know involve men. Travelling alone as a man makes you suceptible to getting ripped off by rickshaw drivers, but that's about it. Women face sexually-loaded threats all the time.

So I'm glad I could help fend off weird men for the week when I was travelling with Catie. For instance, when we were together, Indian men, assuming that Catie and I were married, woudl ask me if they could take her picture. This raises some red flags amidst my feminist principles, of course, but I gather that I was appreciated as a buffer zone.

The one time I actually did anything in the way of 'protection' was at the Dalai Lama's monestary. Catie and I had split up a bit, and a man asked her to be in a photo with her son. She's a sucker for kids, and agreed, but snother man decided to be in the picture as well. He scooted up next to Catie and put his arm around her.

"I said I'd be in a picture with the kid, not you," she said. When I turned around, from 30 feet away, I saw the one guy actively blocking her way. I started over that direction and called out, "Catie, uh, do you want to stay here or should we keep going, or something?" I was inarticulate, but the guys left immediately.

I'm really glad they dispersed, because I don't know what I would have done. Start a fight? Me? No, those guys didn't hightail-it because they were threatened--they left because they thought they had ventured onto some other guy's 'territory.' Not only, in the popular imagination, are women trapped between men and death (ie, men and men), but there is an elaborate set of agreements between the men wh oare doing hte resucing and those who are doing the endangering. This stuff isn't unique to India, of course, but white women are so foten turned into objects of desire that these dynamics are n display like the gender roles in Bollywood movies.

A nasty side effect of all this is that Western tourists spend a fair amount of time discussing the various ways they've been ripped off or approached. IT goes like this; people who like to take advantage of tourists tned to follow tourists, and tourists tend to be concentrated. You can see the sites in India, and meet only people who are trying to scam you. For men, I find this more or less intolerable, since for me it's an unnatural focus on the negative. I'm glad I spent a lot of time with really nice people in Kolkata so I have a permanent reminder that the vast-vast-vast majority of Indians are definitely not creeps or cheats. As travllers, we should have some perspective on where we are.

But for women it's different, and the negative stuff is so scary and represents such a different set of power relations that it's impossible to cast it aside. I'm glad that I'm a man while travelling alone in India, so I don't have to deal with all that stuff.

I wasn't aware I had a love life in India.

[OK, OK, the blog's not over yet.]

I remember once, towards the beginning of the summer when Jishnu, the son of Vikramshila's director, walked in the office. He started talking to KP, and she starting talking back. They did not touch, they did not say anything mushy, but I thought to myself, "They are an item." Immediately afterwards, I reined myself back in.

"No, no, Sam. Cultural signals are different in foreign countries. What you think is a signal of affection may well be a signal of some other feeling; gastrointestinal pain, for example."

And yet, a week later, Jishnu and KP and I all went out to dinner the next week. I told Jishnu and KP about Rachel, the girlfriend from back home*, at which point KP told me, "Yeah, Jishnu and I are a thing." A few days later, someone told me that thing actually meant that they are engaged.

Then, last month at the Lake Centre, Swarupa, a very cute 13 year old girl, and Subhadeep, a very cute 14 year old boy, would not stop punching each other. I was trying to lead some activity (probably very boring) and they were refusing to pay attention. I debated with myself whether or not to intervene, until it occurred to me that when teenage boys and girls touch each other, it's probably because they enjoy touching each other.

So, I've been feeling pretty good about my ability to interpret intercultural romantic signals. People flirt pretty much the same way everywhere, I was beginning to believe, and I, observant fellow that I am, can read this not-so-secret lenguaje de amor.

Until today. I had asked KP and Shubhra if they would like to go out to lunch with me before I take off to Delhi. Shubhra, at least, will be gone when I return, so I thought it would be a nice goodbye to people who have been very good friends to me since I've been here. Shubhra, as it turned out, was busy; but as of this morning, KP and I were still on.

I was reading at the table in the office's modest conference room, when KP plopped down across from me. She said,

"I don't think we should go out to lunch today."
"Oh, that's too bad," I replied.
"I think you'll agree with me once you hear my reasons." She was giving me the classic KP smirk, but seemed to be getting more serious by the second.
"Well, you are very persuasive."
"You see, relationships between men and women are very different in India, and there's all this gossip in the office. About how you and I have been spending a lot of time together alone."
"We have?" I asked.
"Well, you know, we were both in the office last weekend alone," she explainied
"We were working. In the office." She remained expressionless. I continued the explanation: "Where people work."
"Well, but you always come talk to me before talking to other people in the office, and they are wondering, 'why did he ask KP out to lunch and not anyone else.'"

Absolutely none of this stuff had been on my radar at all--so much for stealth-like interpretation of romantic signals. When she told me that even our physical proximity had sent up the antennae of our gossip-starved co-workers, I was completely dumbfounded, "What physical proximity?" I started laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing. My sense of humor about the matter was not appreciated. KP told me to quiet down, lest I provoke further speculation.

"And it's hard too, because they all know Jishnu," she said. I was confused.
"Why wouldn't that make them less suspicious?"
"Well, because then he's the poor guy who doesn't know what's going on behind his back. And since I've been told by people that you like me, and I continue to lead you on in this way, then I'm partner to the whole thing."

I was, at this point, utterly befuddled. She seemed to be saying that being aware of an untrue accusation (that Sam and KP are having some romantic fling) compelled her to act differently, in case she encourage my non-existent behavior.

"So people think that you have this crush on me." KP pauses, becomes more serious. "Do you?"
"No," I responded. "Well, I mean, I like you, and I like talking to you, but I certainly don't...I main, I wouldn't want to....no."
"OK."

What was so difficult about her question was that: yes, of course I have a crush on her, in the same way that I have a crush on so many of my good friends. What's a crush except enthusiasm about a person? But all of this, the revelation of all these thoughts, the quiet accusation, put me on the defensive. I felt like a 5th grader trying to deny my classmates' jeers--"No way. I don't like girls. Girls are gross."

"So, if the way you and I behave is cause for office gossip, is there a way we could have acted that would not have made people talk?" She thought for a minute.
"No, I don't think so."
"Then are men and women just not friends in India?"
"Not really."

I have been better friends with KP than with other people in the office, in part because of the time she's spent in the US. That gives her the ability to speak my cultural language a little bit, which is obvoiusly welcome. Furthermore, I'm not sure exactly who in the office people expected me to be friends with; I was the only male.

The more I think about this whole thing, the madder I get about it. I composed a short speech in my head after KP left to go do something.

"KP," I would say, in this imaginary world, "I'm mad at you about the lunch thing. Essentially, you're saying you'd prefer to bypass mild ridicule on the part of people in the office, rather than say a proper goodbye to a friend who you likely won't see for years."

Intstead I said, "Well, I guess I'll see you sometime, then," and waved, and marched off to catch my plane to Delhi. At the time, I reasoned that, on my last day, there was simply no compelling reason to ruffle feathers, and that it's better to leave on good terms. But really, I said nothing because I feared that this misunderstanding was simply the inevitable result of the wide, impassable cultural canyon separating KP and I. That's the classic crutch: "It's culture." KP had explained it that way, arguing, "you couldn't understand--things are just different in India." We, as individuals, had no part in the interaction--it was just the natural result of two opposite civilizations making contact. An Orientalist theory of friendship.

What I mean is, I didn't tell KP I was mad at her, I didn't afford her the respect I afford my closest friends, because she's Indian. And so, on the day I left Kolkata, I felt as as alien as I did on the day I arrived.

*Rachel, ie Raquel, has a fantastic blog about being in Juarez, Mexico, so here's a little blog tag-team shout-out action: www.encontrandolafrontera.blogspot.com.

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.

The benefits of being made culturally uncomfortable

A few Saturdays back, I went to the Lake Centre to play some math games with the kids. We did math for a while, until they got bored. At that point, they handed me some lyrics from a song they learned in school, and asked me to sing it. I looked at the lyrics and laughed—the song, “Bind us Together, Lord,” was a hymn their teachers at the Catholic school had taught them. I had a really hard time convincing them that I didn’t know the tune.

It was during this disagreement when a cadre of Irish college students dropped by to visit. Their organizer had contacted Vikramshila as part of their volunteer program—they are teaching in Kolkata for the summer, as well as learning about development by attending some debates and lectures, as well as observing various NGOs. They all crowded into the already crowded room, and started chatting with the kids. Within a couple of minutes, we discovered that we were heading to Delhi on the same day. But the moment they won me over for good, if they hadn’t already with their Irish charm and friendliness and good looks, is when they proposed a song exchange with the kids. The 10 Irish students performed “Peel banana.” For your reading convenience, I transcribe the lyrics here, along with a description of the accompanying dance:

“Peel banana!! Peel, peel banana!” 2x [slow slide of the hands down the side of the body]
“Chop banana! Chop, chop banana!” 2x [karatae chop motion, alternating hands]
“Mash banana! Mash, mash banana!” 2x [appropriate and convincing mashing gesture]
“Go banana! Go, go bananas!” 2x [uninhibited flailing of arms and legs]
The kids, in return, sang “Bind us Together, Lord.” I was slightly afraid that the Irish folks might imagine I had taught these six Hindu children a Catholic hymn—in any case, they seemed to share my sense of cultural embarrassment. But, being the good papists that they are, several of them chimed in.

Immediately after the meeting, I was invited up to watch the rugby match that several of the guys (er, blokes) were playing in. I happily agreed.

The match was played at the Calcutta Cricket and Football Club (CC&FC), which is a holdover from the British era, although the vast majority of the present members are Indians. It has a posh clubhouse and a bar with discount drinks for members. The Irish students have a temporary membership thanks to their participation on the CC&FC Rugby team. I had a really nice time watching the game and drinking a couple of beers on the porch of the clubhouse as the evening cooled down. Brendon and I spent a long time talking politics, which involved me apologizing a lot for living in a country where we elected Bush, and him explaining the Irish government system to me. Somewhere in the conversation, I mentioned to Brendon that Americans, especially people from blue states, tend to have romantic notions of Europe, the enlightened and liberal place where they are civilized enough to have good trains and universal health care. Some of this is well-deserved, but some of if is a warm and fuzzy caricature of a place that has its fair share of race riots and fascists. I mentioned that the stereotypical American is that of a loudmouth cowboy. Brendon added that America is the place where they make candy bars out of corn syrup.

I was invited to play a game of football (er, soccer) the next afternoon. I happily said I would come, while warning them that I was, in fact, very bad at football. They told me not to worry.

When I arrived at CC&FC the next afternoon at 3:30, only one of the guys had shown up. Mike and I sat and talked for an hour until we had enough people to play a smallish game. The group, it seems had been out to the clubs until 5:45 in the AM, and was just about getting over their massive hangovers. We played around for a while, which was fun enough, although I was so bad that I didn’t do very much. I think I stayed out of the way enough to avoid interfering.

Later, having a drink on the porch again, I had a chat with a really nice guy named Brian, who is studying environmental science. He told me about his year in France, which he said was a blast, and about how eye-opening he finds India. It seemed like he and I would have a lot in common.

But after some conversational digging, it seemed like we had less in common than I had imagined, at least in terms of our trips to India. We started talking about the food. He said that he loved Indian food, but that it had become a bit monotonous. Their group goes out to eat for all their meals, he said, and they tend to visit the same nearby places. I asked him if they ate a lot of samosas (pyramid-shaped fritters stuffed with potatoes) and dosas (a South Indian lentil pancake that you dip in all kinds of stuff) and he had neither heard of either. I figured out why a couple minutes later when one of the guys said, “I just can’t be bothered to eat vegetarian food.” Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it pays to be flexible with your eating habits, especially in a country where so much of the good cuisine is meatless.

And another thing he said surprised me even more—Brian and some of the guys briefly discussed going out to catch a movie. One candidate was Krishh, which is sort of an Indian Superman given the Bollywood treatment—it’s three and a half hours long, and has a ton of song and dance numbers. I mentioned that it was in Hindi, to which Brian replied, “Well, but they’ll have English subtitles, won’t they?” I said I was pretty sure they wouldn’t, which was a big surprise to the whole group. Why they thought that a Hindi movie playing in India would have English subtitles is beyond me.

I realize I’m running the risk of seeming condescending here—“Oooh look at me, I have the more authentic Indian experience”—but I am thankful to have been thrown into a situation where I’ve had to sink or swim a little bit. I remember how KP introduced me to some issues of Indian etiquette. We were sitting in a teacher training meeting, and the fan above me was blowing away a piece of paper I had been taking notes on. I put the paper under my toe. Later, KP told me, “In India, we don’t touch things with our feet. It’s considered a sign of disrespect.” I apologized and told her that no disrespect was intended to the material of the workshops.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “But we just don’t do it.” KP spent six years in the states, and she knew that I thought I was just being practical. And while she understood my explanation, there are just some things you’re supposed to do.

But, when you’re in a big group of other white people, even if they are supposedly infused with a fair deal of European civility, it’s easy not to pick up on those things. To take an example, Brendon told me about being in a local bar. He was trying to get the attention of a local woman, so he, innocently enough, tapped her on the shoulder. Immediately, the woman’s brother and her husband descended upon him, and the program coordinator stepped in to try and prevent the imminent fight. In the end, the whole group was thrown out.

What’s more is that the Irish students had an orientation where they were explicitly told, “don’t touch Indian women!” I don’t know why I’ve never run into this problem, never having been warned about it: but I think it has to do with spending a lot of time around Indian people here, and watching their behaviors, and trying to go with the flow. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve had my fair share of cultural blunders, and made incorrect presumptions. But because I’ve constantly been around Indians, I’ve both had the ability to correct an understanding or an action (by talking to people around me), and the necessity to correct it (or else I offend all of my friends).

Not to say I don’t like the Irish folks—in fact, they are rather wonderful. They befriended me instantly, and they are both interested in what they are seeing here in India, and committed to having a really good time. I intend to meet up with them in Delhi, where they’ve invited me to go to a series of seminars and debates on development. They are a blast to hang out with. I just feel fortunate that I’ve had the opportunity to get pushed off of the path of least resistance that tends to suck in so many travelers.