India Reflections

I’ve been back in the States for two weeks now. Some Indian reflections are in order. Consider this closure.

I think I’ve done all the things in the States that I had been dreaming of all summer. I’m drinking red European wine and eating European cheese as I type. (American wine and cheese were also dreamed about, but it just so happens that I’m going European tonight.) These items are prohibitively expensive in India, but at Costco in the U.S., they’re just the right price. I ate Mexican food at El Maguey. I saw friends and family. I spoke English, and everyone understood. As I type this, I’m thinking, being back home sounds underwhelming, and actually it probably is. I have unfinished business, it feels, in India. Eleven weeks just wasn’t enough time.

I was intimidated by India when I first arrived there. What shocked and scared me most at first was the madness of the streets. People were walking on highways. Also on highways there were roadside stalls set up. People didn’t stop at red traffic lights. And there were just so, so, so many people always on the streets. And thickly spread throughout this sea of people were pavement dwellers, sidewalk sleepers, people crippled by polio pushing themselves along the street on carts, and beggars who always paid extra attention to me because I’m white. And speaking of, for being India’s most famously cosmopolitan city, there are not many white people in the Bombay suburbs. I’ve never been in a country where whitey was the racial minority, and I was always so embarrassed to be white, thinking of all the colonial humiliation perpetrated by European countries onto the non-European in India and elsewhere. It took me a few weeks to get over this sort of unnecessary guilt.

During my first weekend in India I had a pantless little beggar boy latch onto my shirt as I walked by his family’s sidewalk encampment, and I didn’t know what to do with him. I just tried to ignore him. I didn’t want to yell at him. I didn’t know if someone would yell at me for yelling at this little boy. But I know he just latched onto me because I’m white. I was so embarrassed to be walking down the street with this half naked little appendage hanging from me. Some Indian saw the scene and scared the little boy off. Still, this embarrassment made me scared to go places by myself.

And then there’s the staring. People were always staring at me. Especially on the trains.

Then there is the in-your-face poverty everywhere you look. There’s the stinking slum near Marico. There are the beggars at the intersections. There are the pavement dwelling ladies crying out after you as you walk by. And then there are even more persistent little kids than the one who latched onto me.

It took a few weeks, but I got comfortable in India. The lawyers at work would say that I was Indian – what with my train adventures (none of them would ever ride the trains) and love of Indian food. What was happening was, especially in the last few weeks, India was becoming home. I was just getting comfortable there. Yes, I got very frustrated very often, but the fact that I had gotten so comfortable, so good at walking in traffic, so good at pushing rude line-cutters out of my way, so good at enticing rickshaw drivers to make change (very, very few people in India ever will make change for you when you want to break a big bill), this is testament to how well I adapted. And as soon as I had gotten good and adapted, I left. It almost feels like I wimped out. Living in India is a challenge, and right when I was rising to the challenge, I bowed out.

Yes, I got frustrated on my last day when I was ordering food as the mob of rude students pushed me into the short order kitchen’s countertop. But, and as often happens in India, there were some Indians who saw that I was foreign and floundering, and they offered to help. There was no helping that day in the ordering of the lunch food, however. I had already ordered and the cooks had forgotten my order. But still, it was nice that people offered to help even though I didn’t ask. I got help like this on the trains before too. Yes, sometimes Indians can be a little too helpful, but it’s the thought that counts.

India was becoming home, and I feel that I could have stayed longer. I just wasn’t able to stay. I had to come back to Pittsburgh and go to school. So will I ever return to India? Yes, definitely, but I don’t know for how long or in what capacity. There are many places in India I would like to visit: Leh, Calcutta, Pondicherry, Bangalore, pretty much the whole country.

But more importantly, there is my work. I spent a summer studying the Indian legal system. I was just getting knowledgeable in Indian law when I left, and I was at the point where I could have really started helping the Marico lawyers. Now I know so much about Indian law, it feels like a waste to never again use it, so in some way I’ll try to use it, but fact is, I don’t know how returning to India will figure into this. I can use Indian law while sitting at my desk in the U.S., but maybe I’ll use Indian law someday while sitting at a desk or in a hotel in India. I just don’t know about the future, and as for the more near future, I don’t know where I’ll be next summer or the summer after that or when I graduate. Maybe I’ll be in India, but there are so many other places I want to go too: Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Paris, London, New York, Africa, Toronto, Vancouver.

Then there is the grinding and disgusting poverty of India. There was a point in India where the poverty was making me depressed. I hated myself because through no fault of my own I was not born into poverty. The poverty of India is heart wrenching. But honestly, it feels so far away from me as I sit here in Pittsburgh. There are beggars in Pittsburgh, but in the U.S. we call them bums. There’s a bum who posts out by the grocery store begging money. I walked by him last week and refused to give him money. I spent an hour or so afterwards at Borders. Then I went to the wine store, which is also the liquor store, and who should I see but the same begging bum. The beggars in India usually are not bums. They are genuinely distressingly poor, and while so many U.S. bums are rotund, most Indian beggars are rail thin. I did see some older begging women in India who were carrying extra weight, and I’m unsure how to explain this past conjecture.

But now I’ve committed myself to keeping compassion for the impoverished, and I can’t forget about India, and I can’t forget what I’ve seen. So maybe if I do anything in India in the future, it will be related to the poverty struggle. What will I do to support the movement? I don’t know. I did get an invitation to go live in the Indian countryside and write a report for CRY…

Also, giving Amar the money I did and spending more time with him (we spent a day at Juhu Beach and another evening drinking juice at a restaurant during my last week in Bombay, plus he went to the airport with me) and seeing how happy I had made him, this made me forget some of the poverty. I – I mean my mom – made one person not so poor.

And even though we here in the U.S. are completely sheltered from the Indian-style poverty, trust me, it exists, and it’s miserable. It will make you feel mean and jaded. You’ll feel there is nothing you could possibly do to even begin to alleviate any of the poverty, so what’s the point in even trying to help? For every Amar you help, there are 100,000 more just in India. And then what about Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico? I don’t know, but I’ll keep fundraising for CRY while I think of the answer, and I promise that when I own my own company, I won’t enrich myself at the expense of the dignity of others.

I talked a lot of trash in the past on the weakness of human rights law. International human rights law is not a strong area of law – these “laws” have no real way to ever be enforced – but stare an Indian beggar, crippled by polio, in the face, and tell him that he deserves to die – and the sooner the better – just because he was born poor in a poor country and caught a common childhood disease. It’s a lot easier to write these people off when you’re reading about them in the newspaper at an American suburban Starbucks on Sunday morning than it is to have them grab your shirt while you’re sitting in the back of a rickshaw in the Bombay suburbs.

Nevertheless, where will I be next Sunday morning? Probably at Starbucks reading the newspaper. Poverty exists, and you either have to be jaded or ignorant. I’m jaded, and I feel mean. But I experience bouts of ignorance. Three weeks ago I was drinking $8 Coronas with Christine at the Bayview Bar at the Oberoi Hotel on Marine Drive watching the sun set over the Arabian Sea. I wasn’t thinking about the poverty, and I was happy – ignorant and happy. What to do? What to do? I don't know.