People, Places, and Things

My writings on India, like my thoughts, remained unfinished for a long time. I spent a month running around Rajasthan by myself, having an abundance of experiences that probably could have been wrapped up nicely into anecdote form, complete with unusual spacing and self-conscious commentary. But I couldn’t write about them because I hated India too much. When my MSID amigos went away – to South India, to Nepal, to Thailand, to Bhutan, to anywhere but Rajasthan – I lost that critical layer of perspective that had helped me laugh instead of cry about all the weirdness everywhere.

And it, well, sucked.

My body craved human contact and comfort, but any touch (especially from someone of the opposite sex) was wrong and invasive and degrading. Normal gestures like a friendly pat on the shoulder or head had become mutated by the social and religious moors of the country. I started to involuntarily shudder whenever anyone brushed against me. And I felt strangely dirty, as if I had done something, I must have done something to deserve being subjected to the touches and brushes and gropes.

As my body wilted, my mind desperately needed someone I could connect with, but whenever I tried to find even a hint of normalcy the conversation would suddenly shift towards something alien and/or inappropriate and/or wrong and I’d be crushed. And there’d be no one to laugh about it with, no one to tell me it was ok when they’re Indian and repressed and not worse just different. There was no escape and nothing I could tell myself to make it all go away.

And I couldn’t write about it because that made it true, sealed the deal. I had failed. I just hated, I mean reaaaaally hated the whole damn country that I had tried so hard to love.

It’s now been ten months since I was there. Time has almost totally healed what hours and hours spent trying to rationalize couldn’t even staunch. When I close my eyes and imagine India now, I don’t relive all the stuff that sickened me. I drink mango shakes on a hot day. I eat boiled eggs with spices from the eggwalla on the street. I watch creamy sunsets over lakes and specked stars as I lie in the desert. I play rugby with the street children and jacks with the village children. I stumble around and look foolish and people laugh and feed me and ask me about my life. I get invited to weddings. I experience hospitality and generosity as complete and pure as anything I’ve ever felt from people who have nothing and want nothing.

When I think of India now, I think of people full of hope and happiness and anger and despair. I think of places sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideous, often seemingly contradictory but always quintessentially Indian. I think things I want to forget, but a lot of things I wouldn't change for anything.

I miss India. Perhaps someday I'll go back.

Things

To smoke or not to smoke? That may not be THE question, but it’s certainly one of them while I’m here in India.

I don’t really smoke cigarettes back home, but I’ve started doing it occasionally in India- mostly because living here is so damn stressful and the delicious but evil smoke calms me down a bit.

In India, the men smoke constantly. The women never smoke. What am I supposed to do? I want to fit in, but gender inequity aint cool yo. Do I spoke to show that women can do anything that men do? Do I not smoke to show that I can respect their cultural norms? Does smoking represent women being empowered or American women being sluts? Should I compromise and only smoke bitis, the evil little homemade uber-cancer sticks that rural men and women smoke and nobody likes?

It’s exhausting to always be noticed and analyzed and judged. All the time, no matter where you are or who you’re with, people are watching. I am not Sarah Press in India. I am the living embodiment of the White American Woman (Probably Rich) and everything I do reflects on not just me but my people.

Which is ok. I can deal. Honestly, I can. But for the love of god(s), do I really need to have this mental debate in my head every time I think about lighting up? It really negates the whole stress reduction thing.

Things

---This is mostly cribbed from the second half of the impromptu and almost awkwardly earnest speech I gave for my internship presentation on the last day of the MSID India program.---

And so I’ll do all that. And then I’ll go home. India, for all its glory, is not and will never be home for me. And being here made me realize how much I absolutely love America. I mean completely and totally love it. I see the deeply embedded problems in India- education, health, the environment, and of course gender –and I know that they need to be addressed. But I have neither the ability to blend in and work as a peer in the community nor the patience to dedicate my life to such small incremental change over generations. And I think I’ll always feel a little uncomfortable and to some extend paralyzed at the idea of intruding into a culture I don’t completely understand and enforcing solutions that might be unnecessary or unwanted. I care about the Indians I have met and believe in what they want to do. And I’ll do what I can to share my ideas and assess their policies and make other small contributions. But ultimately, it’s their fight and not mine. At some point there will be little more I can do but wish them well.

I look at America. A country where the same types of problems exist but to me they appear challenging instead of insurmountable. They are problems that, in many cases, I have personally experienced in areas that I live in and understand. I know where I stand in America and can see the tremendous potential that exists here. And I genuinely believe that my actions now and in the future can have a real and positive impact for as long as I still care and still breathe. And that’s amazing.

I’m not going to dedicate my life to development work in India. But what can I take from my experiences here and translate into my work back home? There were a lot of things I didn’t like about Cecoedecon and the way it operated. One of those things was hypocrisy. I don’t think you can preach the gospel of caste equity in a village and then go home and give a different type of teacup to your servant because you’re a Brahmin and he or she is not. It’s obvious.

But what seems obvious over here becomes so much murkier when I travel across oceans and the colors are different. What exactly do I want to do with my life when I get back? I want to create a tutoring program that will provide affordable education assistance to everyone in the area and also build ties in the community. I want to encourage high school students to create their own public service projects that address environmental issues, health issues, discrimination issues, all the other problems that people need to actively combat. I want parents and other adults to replicate those ideas in their own lives. Basically, I want a lot. But I can’t expect other people to believe in these values unless I am able to internalize them all myself. And that goes beyond turning down plastic bags at the supermarket. I need to have my life reflect what I want others to do.

At the same time, there is a fine line between practicing what you preach and being preachy. Living here has reinforced in my mind the harm that comes from condescending attitudes towards the group you are trying to help or change. The women who come to the villages to inspire social change while refusing to eat dinner with the villagers and interact with them are not doing things well. How do I avoid that? A lot of the values that Netta talked about from Shikshanter applies here, about how a city as a learning city where everyone has something to contribute and can help one another. The understanding that you are creating a space where everyone can interact with one another rather doesn’t just sound nice on paper…its true.

And corruption in the NGO sector. My friends and I categorized the microfinance operations of cecoedecon as “corrupt” because of the way they seem to shave off extra interest when transferring loans from the bank to the cooperative societies without doing anything to deserve it. They are not operating at an optimum level of efficiency because they are trying to profit where they can, and that strikes me as wrong. But in America that type of “corruption” is to some extent celebrated and supported. Social entrepreneurship is all the rage. You can do good AND do well.

Which sounds great to me. I was cut from a competitive and driven cloth. I want to be successful, to be respected, to be great. I thought I had found a way to have both. I could exercise my social and business sense and become an Ashoka Fellow and an Echoing Green grant recipient and a Skoll Superhuman Transformer Person (or whatever they call their awards). The grant money (and the accolades that come with it) would start rolling in and I could turn down making $400,000 as a corporate lawyer to make $200,000 as a chief executive officer of an NGO instead. Sweet.

It all rings false to me now. Getting millions of dollars is not the ideal level of efficiency for a social venture. The kinds of programs I want to develop should not require the funds of three gigantic grant-givers in order to function. I’ve learned from SWAT and other programs operating at ground zero that you can do a lot with very little. And that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to get money for the sake of winning and prestige. That money should be left for the scholarship programs and the house building projects and the research for AIDS vaccinations, things that actually do require a lot of buck for the bang. There is something almost perverse about trying to differentiate yourself from your social venture ‘competitors’ like you do with toothpaste. Colgate and Crest may never be on the same teeth cleaning team, but I want the people trying to cheaply produce hybrid cars and create job training programs on my side.

More than just my program ideal has changed- my personal ideal has as well. Although it’s hard for me to swallow, I think that maybe, just maybe I can no longer do the things I want to do and make the amount of money I want to make and be the person I want to be simultaneously. It would mean accepting the kind of corruption and hypocrisy that on some level I know is not right. That realization will require me to make changes in both what I do to live comfortably both now and in the future.

Which all sounds very noble. Trust me, it's not. I'm not sacrificing everything, and the little that I do sacrifice I do because I have to as much as because I want to. It’s so easy to fall into a superiority trap when you’re acting more socially conscious than others. And maybe that attitude of superiority would be fine if you were living in a bubble and just doing things for yourself. But you can’t do good in a bubble, everything relies on other people. A self-promoting attitude is really just self-destructive when you’re trying to convince others to work with you.

I wanted to be the next great social entrepreneur. But what does that even mean? That I'm the BEST? I think up the BEST ideas? Ideas are not organic. Every person in the world comes from a different series of life events that has shaped what they believe in the present. I was lucky enough to have a series of positive interactions with others that caused me to think that I should give back to the UNC employees. And through my classes and personal conversations the idea as grown from there, and maybe it will grow more in the future. And perhaps I’ll come across other good ideas in the future. Those good ideas can and should be shared. But that sharing must come from love and understanding and respect, not from a pool of self-gratification. I need to constantly remind myself that even if I come across the greatest idea on the planet, and use it to create the greatest model in the world has ever known, it’s still only the idea that is great. Not me.

It’s these lessons that I have learned and reinforced during my time here. From the lectures I heard from the teachers and the debates I had with my friends. From the people I worked with at my NGO and the people they tried to help. From gmail chats with friends back home and late night conversations when I was walking the line between lucidity and total exhaustion. From the times when I was so busy and overwhelmed that I wanted to scream and the times when I was completely and totally bored and had absolutely nothing to do but think. From India.

People

I killed time waiting in the Mumbai International Airport for my friends to arrive by scrutinizing the faces of all the Indian women who walked back and forth in front of me. It was really rather interesting, all the varieties of noses and eyes and ears that can exist in one room. I to imagine how each woman I saw could be found staggeringly beautiful or tremendously unattractive based on which feature was emphasized and wondered if maybe beauty actually is in the eye of the beholder.
And then in walked Bollywood Actress Katrina Kaif.


Damn girl.
Screw that theory.

Post Script- I spent a few minutes looking at different pictures of Katrina so I could pick one that showed what she looked like without seeming semi-pornographic. I turned around to see the head of the internet cafe staring at me strangely. You all might not think I have pornographic tendencies, but internet cafe man certainly does.

People

We laugh and we sigh and we seethe as we see them walking through the tourist traps with their shiny new digital camera thumping merrily against their bulbous thighs and we watch them snapping pictures of cute Indians going about their daily lives and we glance at them eating obscenely overpriced ‘Continental’ food in the tourist restaurants and we take a break from our delicious plate of steaming spaghetti to click on the review button of our own gleaming picture taking equipment and see the smiling faces of adorable Hindustanis staring back at us as we smugly reflect on how different we are from them.

Things

Three Indian commercials that involve two of my favorite things: candy and trickiness

-A boy who is late to class spots an open desk next to a pretty girl and tries to walk quietly in sloooooow motion to his seat without the teacher spotting him. When he gets about halfway there the teacher turns around and sees him. “Get out Melvin!*”The next day, this same young chap is late again. He spots the same open desk in the front and walks in backwards towards the seat. When he gets about halfway there the teacher turns around and sees him. “Sit down Melvin!” Melvin sits down in his seat, grins at pretty girl, and takes a big bite into his granola bar.

-A man and his wife are nuzzling on the couch having some kind of conversation when the woman asked her husband if he has forgotten something…her birthday. The husband has naturally forgotten and for a second looks panicked.
The doorbell rings.
It’s the pizza guy.
The husband takes one look at him and starts screaming.
WHERE ARE THE CANDLES??? WHERE ARE THE CANDLES?? HOW COULD YOU FORGET TO PUT THE CANDLES ON THE PIZZA. Pizza is thrown to the ground. Pizza boy runs away terrified, Husband and wife nuzzle in their bed and share a box of cookies.

-A girl wants to buy a candy bar but store dude says no because she doesn’t have enough money. She sees a dirty looking twenty-something hippie guy against the wall taking a nap and puts a shoebox in front of him. She throws in a coin. Other people walk by and throw in coins as well. After some time, she picks up the shoebox and takes it to the register. She has enough money for TWO chocolate bars, one for herself and one for the sleepy guy who wakes up with a bar of chocolate and wonders what the hell happened.

People

At the end of the three-day conference for CEOs of NGOS that give loans to self help groups there was this cultural presentation thing. Despite the persistent demands by MC and me for the performance of TIN ADMI (which actually translates into “three man” in my grammatically incorrect chipmunky hindi) all the men refused to dance. The next morning, one of the older NGO employees explained that the reason why the men weren’t dancing was because they believed dancing and singing are activities for the women. He recognized that this was stupid, but argued that change takes time. How can people go around to villages preaching the gospel of female empowerment and gender equity but be completely unwilling to change their own conceptions of gender even when they KNOW they’re outdated. “Change takes time” is an excuse for the people you’re trying to change… not for the change agents.