The exchange (India)

We have a new designer in the office. Typical to Indian management, she has zero experience in what she was hired for and a strong accent that makes it difficult for us westerners to understand her. She got the job without receiving an explanation of what her duties would be and was shocked to find that the majority of the office is foreign. What we need is a graphic designer who can do the layout and format of the magazine but she is a fashion designer (or rather, the person who chooses the fabrics and the stitch type, etc) and has no experience with InDesign. She has been very shy for the last two days but decided for some reason today that I was unscary enough to chat with. We had an awesome conversation. She's really cool even though we live extremely different lives. She graduated from college a few years ago and has no interest in an arranged marriage, so has been living at home with her parents while her older brother got a job as an electrician in Madurai, the nearest city. As far as I can tell, she spends the majority of her time alone, as her parents don't get back from their shop until 11pm, watching television and movies. The options here for women are so limited, both in terms of employment and recreation, it's scary.

I have no idea what she is going to do in the future and I don't think she does, either. My guess is that she will be forced into an arranged marriage sometime in the next five years unless she strikes out to a city like Chennai (Madras) or Mumbai (Bombay) on her own and against her parents' wishes. Once the marriage happens, the wife will spend the rest of her life cooking, cleaning and babies. This is sometimes still the case in the US but the difference there is that it is not the requirement. In the towns and villages here, and even in the cities to some extent, it is extremely weird for young people to live with friends or on their own. The family is quite strong here, even more so than in China. We had a bit of a slow cultural exchange this morning as she said "I know nothing about your culture."

She wanted to know my favorite Indian/Bollywood actor. I couldn't name a single one and she was shocked. She said, "I like one of your actors. Arnold." And I said, "Oh, did you know he is a politician now?" Blank look. "Works for the government?" No, did not know. We talked about the giant Hindu temple in Madurai I went to a few weeks ago and she named the king it was built by. Each detail depicts a different aspect of Indian life. She was shocked again when I had no idea who the king was (ca. 1650).

Here, marriages are set up by parents. Advertisements looking for brides or grooms are online and in print but the majority are set up via village networks-- aunt's cousin's friend's daughter with qualities x, y and z, etc. If a married couple has a real problem, it is worked out by each set of parents. There is beginning to be a backlash against the old ways... many of the young people I have met, especially the women, have voiced their desire against having an arranged marriage, preferring to be single forever than married to someone they don't know, or only know vaguely. The only common career option for women seems to be to become a teacher.

She said her father is very strict and would never let her ride a bike and that the Indian man in the office who was hired two weeks ago warned her that the "foreign women are very bold." I'm sure this is a more polite rendering of his actual opinion. She takes the bus to work. I asked her if she told her parents that most of the people she works with are foreign and she said, "Yes, I told them and their eyes went like this!" and mimed shock with her own. Hopefully, she will be allowed to stay. We are quite bold when compared to the Indian ladies in the office and, in reality, they don't even know the half of it in regards to our lives at home. Here, we wear pants and voice story ideas and let them know if something has gone wrong and ride bicycles to work and take breaks when it is convenient and don't go to church and probably a whole slew of other shocking behaviors that I haven't realized are out of the norm yet and that is enough.

She wanted to know about the US. I said that it is quite normal for a couple to live together before they are married, for friends to live with each other, or for someone to live alone. That if a married couple has a problem, they would be angry if their parents got involved; usually they go to a therapist, a doctor who they pay, to help them with their problems. Explaining things out like this made it sound really wacky, particularly given the context and the society here. Also, that women can do whatever they want, pretty much any time; parents don't treat daughters much different from sons. The fact that about half of marriages end in divorce and families will often end up spread very far away from each other was the most surprising and unfathomable to her.

"Photo please?" The kids are usually screaming with excitement but get very somber for the photos, as all Indians do.

No rabies

Now that I've sufficiently given everyone a heart attack (sorry; I didn't know it was so scary!) and learned that you actually need a series of like 15 shots to the stomach to combat rabies, I'll explain what I actually did on the weekend.

Examined this torn down Hindu temple near the house:


Took a picture of this tiny lizard on the wall:


Played badminton again. Women were playing this time! It was much hotter in the gym because all the window shades were closed.




Biked around Sivakasi and attempted to find somewhere to buy toilet paper. Was presented with tissue paper and packing tape. No...

Downtown:


Found this tall thing:


Hindu:


Spied on the family chatting with the neighbors in Tamil:


And sat on the roof, looking at the stars and listening to Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater's adaptation of "The War of the Worlds" again and tried to calculate where the sound waves are now, 69 years after the first broadcast (460,241,385 miles, past Jupiter and on their way to Saturn if I did it right.. probably not because I only used the speed of sound at sea level). It made me happy to think about my own radio show flying farther and farther away.

Rabies

The weekend was relatively uneventful until we went to a girl's home who we met on the visit to the women's college. She fed us a lot of lunch and we chatted about arranged marriages and how she definitely does not want to be married. She showed us a bunch of family photos and I asked about a picture of two men that looked like it was from a 1970s cop movie. She said, "Oh, that is the photo they showed my sister when she was to be married. It's the first time she saw her husband."

We took a rickshaw home and the other two wanted to stop for coffee. Being that I don't drink coffee, I begged off and walked home. I cut through the dirt area that cuts off a longer corner, going by four or five homes. There were a bunch of people and kids gathered outside and a dog. A few days ago, I had heard a dog growling at me while "Photo please?"ing four kids but he seemed to be in the house so I didn't do anything about it. Yesterday, he was outside. He is blond and medium-sized. He saw me coming and started hobbling on three legs. My heart started beating faster. "Don't look in his eyes. Don't look in his eyes. Sign of aggression. Don't look." Inevitable, I want to know what's going on because I could feel him beaming his "What the hell are you, whitey?" at me. I looked down into his eyes and he was already baring his teeth. "Oh shit oh shit." I looked back up rapidly but it was too late. He had already decided he really hated me and BIT MY LEG. I screamed and one of the men yelled at the dog and he let go, then hit him. It wasn't as bad as it could have been but my leg was bleeding in three places. My fear of dogs was thus renewed severely and painfully. I limped away as quickly as possible, back to the house, where they all saw my bleeding leg. I told him what happened and he said we should probably go to the hospital to get a rabies shot. Visions of myself foaming from the mouth with a rotting brain quickly sprang to mind.

We got on the motorcycle, since it was faster than ordering a rickshaw and drove the three miles or so to the hospital. It was really small, two floors and about 50 people in the waiting room. The family father explained the situation to the receptionist in rapid Tamil while everyone else stared at the bleeding foreigner. Despite the large number of patients, I still got into the doctor in less than half an hour. The doctor spoke English, albeit heavily accented, just like most people. I assume no one else has had a rabies shot that's reading this, so I will tell you that it comes out of a freaking GIGANTIC needle!! On the plus side, no foaming from the mouth or extreme insanity yet. I made it home in time for tea.

Yesterday was the yearly statewide striking day in support of a deeper canal between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. If it happens, there will be much freer trade and an improved economy for both the state and Sri Lanka. [I'm sure this next part is terribly paraphrased but you get the gist]. When they began construction on the project, they hit an underground stone bridge which is apparently the path a Hindu god took to the island to find a monkey. Very holy. Now, some people are up in arms about the canal because it will destroy this special underwater path while the rest of the state wants the increased trade. All the shops on the street, offices and schools were closed. The hardcore supporters of the canal were on a hunger strike till 6pm. Today is a national holiday, Gandhi's birthday, but everything is open.

ps. just kidding about the rabies. i almost got bitten by that mean dog, but i didn't. had to spice things up a little bit.

Badminton as liberation

Last night, I, and the three other women I live with, went to play badminton with Pabbu from the office at the local gym. First, he took us to his parents' house where his mother fed us Indian deserts (unidentifiable fruity pastries) and mashed apples mixed with milk and water. The home was quite tall as the family is relatively well off. They're built that way so that all the hot air goes near the ceiling, making it much cooler than most homes. The gym is a large building with four badminton courts and a small gym with old but still often used equipment. Kind of spooky, like the place a school dance would be held during which all the kids are killed or scarred for life when the ghost of a former student wreaks revenge. I'd never thought of badminton as a particularly liberating (or even particularly interesting) sport but, last night, I definitely did. It was a bit of freedom in this place where all we can do is go to work and back home at night. It would be weird to go for a run here, especially for a woman. Whenever one of us is out "late" (9pm) the host family worries and will sit on the front step of their house, waiting. Despite having to wear pants and a loose T-shirt in the 85-degree building, it was still nice and fun. We were the only women there. The men didn't seem to think it too odd that we were there but I think they would have if we had been Indian. As in China, foreigners here get a sort of "by" to vaguely strange behavior. We left at 10pm to the anxious thought of "Ah, we should not be out this late!"

I've been thinking about the purpose of this trip the last few days because there's been nothing to do in the office. First, the internet was out. Now, I am lethargic, especially about work. I remember saying very vehemently before I left that my main goals were to learn and to make friends. I was reading this op-ed by Danielle Trussoni in the New York Times. She writes quite often about her trip to Vietnam, even though it was years ago. I don't have such a personal connection to any of the places I have been, or am going to, but it makes me wonder what effect the trip will have on me in the years to come, particularly because China and India are such evolving nations and both have a lot of controversy surrounding them. The subjects are endless.

Photo please?

Yesterday, we took a visit to the printer to see how the October issue is coming along. It was about 110 degrees in there. Looks pretty good, this guy is working on it and the coloring.


Took a rickshaw there, it's the easiest way to get anywhere that's not in biking distance. I took a minute's worth of video on the way.


They also print a lot of fireworks boxes, especially for Standard which is the biggest producer in town. Who doesn't want demented Santa fireworks?


Yesterday was Laura's birthday, so Jeryn and Annie got some fireworks and we set them off in a field near the house. The host mother bought a cake and we ate it with our right hands. Finally, everyone (the family and us four) sat down together -- but only briefly. Better than nothing. Sivakasi's main industry is fireworks and printing so there are fireworks almost every night (testers).

It's been feeling quite hot lately even though the weather has been the same as always. It's perfectly clear during the day and cloudy at night so the stars are never out. The night clouds are always really high in the atmosphere and kind of tiled; it creates a violet dome over Sivakasi.

The kids here are so funny. One little girl in the neighborhood either has foreigner-radar or has learned our schedule because she will come running from up to a block away, screaming in high-pitched little girl, "Photo please? Photo please?" then strike a model pose. She's the one on the far right in the first photo; the others are the giggle gang who live in the house behind. I think they are interested in the instant photo gratification; I haven't seen anyone else with a digital camera here besides us. All the kids say the same thing, "Hi! Hi! Photo please?" And if they are gutsy, add "Pen?" The third photo is the next door neighbor's little boy. He's too young to talk but we took about twenty photos of him last night and by the end, he thought the flash was HILARIOUS.







I forgot an important part of local women's fashion. They all wear beautiful jasmine flowers in their hair! Literally, at least 80% of the women you see will have the flowers. Today, we got some, too.

Bats, burqas, Bollywood and cricket

I was lying on the bed last night, reading, when a large blur flew through my peripheral vision. I looked up, praying it was a humongous butterfly, but no, it was a small BAT. A bat came into the house through the open window behind me. Obviously, I screamed like a girl and ran into the other room and shut the door. A braver soul than I went out to investigate and found it had already flown out the opposite open window. Huge crisis averted.

Cricket is huge in India. Last night, India beat their biggest rival, Pakistan, in the finals of the world championships (I think?) and the neighborhood went nuts and horns were honking even more than usual. People set off fireworks (fireworks is Sivakasi's biggest industry so they were close at hand) and I had no idea what was going on because we have no TV.

I've been talking to some of my friends about the plight of Indian women. I think the country is in a strange stage of transition. Bollywood billboards will show women wearing shorts and tank tops but a woman on the street, at least in this area, would NEVER wear that. Maybe in Delhi. But no one seems terribly offended to see it on the advertisements. I think the conservative dress is part tradition and part religion. This area of India is culturally conservative and it is now easy for me to see how an even greater extreme like the burqa could come to be the norm. I don't find the concept of burqas so odd or repressive anymore. I found out from my friend that some women are so staunch about remaining completely covered at all times that some burqas have slits in the front for sex.

Male dress in India is an awesome time warp. Most of the young men dress like they're in 1971 America with bellish bottoms and a short-sleeved, loose but not too loose, patterned button-down shirt. Older men (if they are thin) usually wear a loose shirt with what westerners would qualify as a skirt but is actually a "dhoti." They have slits in the front and are folded halfway up then tied in a loose front knot that they constantly tie, untie and otherwise fiddle with.

Barbershop


Despite dowrys being officially illegal, arranged marriages and dowrys are still commonplace. In the household where I live, the mother and father were married at the respective ages of 19 and 21. The first daughter was born a year later.

Speaking of Bollywood, I saw my first Bollywood movie on the bus over the weekend. It was like the Dukes of Hazzard TV show combined with a bad kung fu flick + a musical + the opening scene of a 1970s porno (the part where they show the "plot").

On the move

On Friday, I went on seven buses to the southwestern coast of India, in the state of Kerala, not too far from Sri Lanka. It took nine hours to get there but the travel doesn't really bother me because it's so interesting to watch what's going by. The buses passed through about 800 million small towns and villages on the way, including one at the very top of a mountain. It was a really bumpy journey up the mountain and there aren't any guardrails. It's normal for it to take forever to get somewhere here even if the towns aren't that far apart from each other as the crow flies because of mountains and a lack of roads/highway system. The railway system is extensive but not very direct between small towns. It made it much clearer what people mean when they say that India is a developing nation and what, exactly, Third World means. I passed through towns where the families had two walls and no roofs and their home was one room. The other walls would be pieces of tarp. Some of the houses were made out of sticks and some of them had collapsed on one side. Some of the homes were gigantic, had a car and three motorbikes parked outside, and overlooked beautiful valleys. We passed people bathing and washing their clothes in waterfalls and rivers. It didn't scream poverty to me because no one seemed unhappy but I thought back to the US and just how far "ahead" of this kind of disparity we are. I was looking at CNN's obesity map of the United States and half of the states have a population of >25% obese. The rest are at 20-24%, save Colorado which is 15-19%-- all up from >10% in 1986. There is easy access to good food, hospitals, prescription drugs, roads and fresh water in the US so now we're ruining our health in the other direction. And obsessing over the psychology of our actions while we do it.



On a similar note, I've been thinking about the difficulty I had booking a flight out of here to Ghana. The problem was that the airlines and travel agents both needed me to pay by cash via demand draft (similar to COD), or to send it by courier to their offices seven hours away. I could only pay with a credit card if I paid in person and online booking was not possible. The lack of a comprehensive credit system here was very difficult for me to comprehend because America's is so advanced that it's unusual for someone to pay cash unless the purchase is less than $10. I'd say about 80% of the sales at the bookstore I worked at last year were credit. In India, this is unfathomable. On the bus, fruit and nut merchants would come up to the windows to sell their wares while it was stopped and I was thinking about how little they must make and what their lifetime income would be compared to the average American. The vendors will never have the chance to make that much money. However, they will also never have the chance to accrue the thousands of dollars of consumer debt that some of my friends face.

Mountain shop:


Rice paddies:


Saw quite a few child workers during the trip. This kid was selling cotton candy, he's not even that young. Some of them, especially girls, are like six:


The beach/town is called Varkala. Small hotels and shops are on top of a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean. The shops had every sort of item a tourist might be interested in: small figurines, candleholders, loads of fabrics, what we think of as Indian clothes (which are not what they actually wear) and shoes. There were some jewelry shops run by Tibetans and Nepalese. I met a guy from Bhutan. The other good thing was the restaurants. They were pretty cheap and served western, Chinese and Indian food. And it was more ok for women to drink alcohol and smoke there, because it is so touristy, so I had three drinks in two days but still managed to shock an Indian man despite the environment. I ordered Chinese food on Friday night because I miss it and was expecting chopsticks for some reason but the dish came with a fork! So, I used a fork for the first time in 2 1/2 months. On Saturday, I had western and it made me a little sick. The same thing happened the two times I had western food in China. I think it's my body not being used to it, not the quality of the food.

Ganesh and Jesus on the bus:


View from the bus:


There are two beaches; one to the north where most of the Indians go, and one to the south where most of the foreigners go so the women can wear bikinis and the men can wear trunks. Indian swimwear is T-shirt and knee-length shorts, regardless of sex. The area and ocean are really beautiful; just like a postcard with palm trees everywhere and waves that break far from the shore. I don't know how I ended up in a tropical paradise, it's never been my wish! But I enjoyed it anyway. I got a nice and awkward sunglasses sunburn, so I look like a pink raccoon right now.

Stray dogs all over Varkala, too. They're really tame and have a defeated attitude; not all excitable and jump-y like escaped dogs in America. The sand underneath the top layer was black.


As you can see, the beach was super beautiful and easy to enjoy. The undercurrent is really strong, stronger than anything I've ever experienced before. As long as you don't go out too far (like no more than 20-30 feet from shore), it's ok, you catch the next wave in, but it is a little scary at the beginning; I just kept thinking back to the guy from my high school who died in the Mexican undertow. Beach regulation and lifeguarding are not nearly as extensive here as they are in the Sttaes. The beach was fun and good until Saturday night. I went down the stairs from the cliff to sit on the beach and look at the nighttime ocean but there was an overpowering stench of poo and dead. I kept going, just to investigate, and found one of the hotels was dumping raw sewage straight into the sand, right where I had been laying earlier in the day! Completely disgusting.

Indian Ocean as the next Lake Erie:


I was talking to a guy from Germany on Saturday at the beach. He was born in 1988 in East Germany and said that, generally, that side of the country is still economically underdeveloped and depressed. The young people leave as soon as they can because there's nothing to do and, culturally, there is nothing. The west is much more modern and still widely preferred.

I'm writing this in the midst of one of the numerous power outages that happen everyday. It's not particularly inconvenient because the computers are on a different power circuit and almost never go off but the lights and fans go off about eight times a day for anywhere from five seconds to twenty minutes each time.

The host family serves coconut chutney quite often. It's a sort of coconut sauce to go with dosai or flat pancake or whatever. They get the coconuts from the palm tree behind their house. The coconut man comes and climbs up the tree and knocks them off! That's his title and his job. Awesome.

Coconut shells behind the restaurant:


Lunch off a banana leaf: