An Ignoramus’ Rendition: India, Round 2

Maybe 5 weeks in India at twenty-four years old wasn’t enough for a fair judgment. Maybe my experience was seen through a Westerner’s arrogant spectacles. Maybe my perceptions were accurate but my information skewed and inequitable?

Fortunately, I have now had two additional months and the help of Rohan – the type of boy who no doubt spent his childhood filling girls’ ponytails with paste, his teen years snapping training bras, and now his adulthood reading and critiquing my blog for the pure enjoyment of getting a rise out of me. I have been given a challenge, in reference to my thoughts on India two years ago, and I quote:

“This will go down very well with the typical white male/female who has already a stereotyped view of India. This just confirms their worst fears and prejudices about the country.

…most Indians are in denial, which is why most will react in the same manner (vehemently patriotic for no reason) to anything negative said about India no matter how true. I am one of them.”

Not quite the bully he seems, Rohan has a valid point and left me thinking how my opinions may have since developed, with a bit more time and information. I humbly acknowledge my own ignorance, on the condition that you also acknowledge a certain open-mindedness on my part, based simply on my unusual willingness to spend a cumulative total of 3 months and 1 week in such a foreign place.

Before I get into this, I have no choice but to back some of my initial viewpoints [which are more opinion than anything]:

(1) You people still drive like crazed maniacs and there is just no denying it. Let’s look at this objectively: I have so many demerits on my driver’s license they’ve threatened to take it away with one more indiscretion, so I’m not what one might call vigilant in terms of road safety, and you still couldn’t pay me to get behind the wheel here. Consider starting by teaching your professional drivers how to operate a manual transmission, so I don’t end up biting the end off my tongue while they go 35km/hr in 5th gear at a whopping 7 RPMs.

(2) I see no problem with toilet paper provision and do not understand how this biodegradable luxury is less economical than the water consumption those high-pressure spray hoses must use. No amount of tree preservation is an excuse for the bathroom floors and every toilet seat in the country to be wet all the time. In fact, save some money by eliminating 1 in every 10 of the housekeepers who work 24 hours a day to clean this mess up, and turn your saved resources back into planting trees. Call it a toilet paper factory if you like–consider hiring the housekeepers whose jobs you’ve taken away to water the trees.

(3) Has no one noticed the amount of garbage accumulating in the streets? It seems to me that manual labor is cheap and people are over-taxed—I won’t pretend I have the knowledge to address your bribery-based government officials—but for Heaven’s sake, can’t they use a fraction of your taxes to hire someone to collect the garbage? It would do wonders for the aesthetics of your cities. Like introducing a unibrow victim to a pair of tweezers, this simple task will allow the natural beauty to be seen where before it was entirely hidden. In fact, (me with my ingenuity), why not take the people currently responsible for painting lines in the streets, (as driving within such structure is just never going to happen,) and assign them to garbage cleanup instead?

(4) Two words: line ups. I am tired of waiting an hour and a half in the mornings for my turn in the elevator. With just a little bit of order the world is a happier place. Take Switzerland, for example – there is no culture more rule driven or order based, and look how happy they are. Granted, it is a measured and controlled happiness, but maybe there’s a middle road that could be found?

(5) I have yet to figure out how you people function in terms of everyday efficiency. Every vehicle is driven like there is a woman in labor in the backseat, and yet it takes 45 minutes for the restaurants to produce an egg with toast. A little consistency in this matter (so I’m able to make an asinine remark on the subject) is all I ask.

(6) I will never understand your affections for car horns. Please tell me how it is even remotely beneficial to your neighbors at a stop light for you to honk and honk and HONK those damn horns so relentlessly? Enough already! Let me tell you a story: I was once driving down a high speed 4-lane highway, when the car in the lane to the right of me signaled a lane change in my direction, clearly unaware of my positioning. Chances are I’m being presumptuous here, but I suspect the ensuing accident would have been fatal, had my use of the horn to create awareness of my position not saved my life. Picture the same scenario in India – no one even hears the bloody horns anymore [except echoing in your head at night when you’re trying to sleep]. It is the Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario, but more like the Horns That Would Not Shut the Hell Up.

(7) I have tried to stay quiet about this, but simply have to document a formal complain about your coffee. As a passionate appreciator of black coffee, I tell you that if I had to stay here for one more week, the depth of my longing for a good cup of coffee would institutionalize me. I can’t quite pinpoint why the flavor of your coffee is so off, but I suspect either it is made from the downstream water of the Ganges [thus bearing feces, used bathwater, and the ashes of cremated relatives] or else from the water that is squeegeed off bathroom floors and collected from the floor drains.

Agree or disagree, those are my thoughts.

I do confess, however, that many of my previous opinions of India were narrow-minded and require either elaboration or correction. Take my impressions of poverty, for example. I believe in North America that poverty does exist, though on a much smaller scale, but is hidden from the public eye. We don’t like to see it; we live, after all, in the Land of Opportunity, where thousands of immigrants a year continue to seek refuge. We take pride in that fact that this is who we are and have been for hundreds of years. We [maybe blindly] tell ourselves that all are equal and opportunity exists for everyone, while quickly flicking World Vision off our TVs on Sunday mornings. My exposure, for example, has been short trips to inner cities to serve food in soup kitchens. Your exposure has meant seeing these people not only in the streets every day of your life, but in your own homes, serving you your meals and cleaning up after you, calling you “sir” since the ripe age of 3 (depending on wealth and caste, of course). So certainly it is a shock to the visitor when you’re stopped at a traffic light and two women holding crying naked babies are knocking on the window of your chauffeured, air-conditioned car. I am aware my perceptions might be excessive and exaggerated, but I see no way of extinguishing my sensitivity to the subject, and am not sure I even want to. It is tragically sad, and I cannot and will not pretend otherwise.

You mentioned a comment I made about the hard expressions I noticed on the faces of locals, and the sad looks I perceived in their eyes. I do openly confess this was an unfair observation, not only because I have no way of knowing the thoughts behind a person’s eyes, but also because the groups of people with which I have associated in my visit is very biased indeed. In reality, they’re more likely thinking “Strange white girl, what are you doing here?” than “Oh woe is me; my life is so sad.” At the office, for example, people are highly educated and doing somewhat menial work, like I said. However, theirs is an industry of vast opportunity and rapid advancement; these people are young and fresh out of government funded university (a concept missing from North America that I see as a tragic flaw in our systems) and for most this job is a stepping stone to greater things. Plus, so many of these people have had opportunities to travel the globe more than I have, and who am I to judge their career choices? At the end of the day, they are happy and seem to have much less arrogant expectations of what they deserve from the universe, possibly creating a deeper satisfaction than we could ever hope to know.

I still confess that I hate being served so extravagantly. I’ve spent the last two and a half weeks trying to remember how one opens a door for oneself, but the concept is lost. I fear that when I get home and need to go somewhere, I will walk to the back door of my car (failing to notice the absence of a Driver) and just stand looking at the door confusedly, wondering why it’s not being opened for me and where the chilled water and today’s newspaper. As long as I don’t go to the extent of writing letters to myself [the owner of my car] complaining about the poor service, I’m sure I’ll find a way to adapt back. However, what I have learned is that the hand-folding bow done in my direction 700 times a day is actually the Namaste greeting and not so much a matter of submissiveness—thank goodness! Once again to compare, I come from a place where customer service is unheard of and I would have to be convulsing on the restaurant floor in a diabetic seizure to get the attention of a waiter or waitress. My mom taught me to do laundry, clean up after myself and cook meals for the family while I was a child, and I don’t respond well to having these things done for me. I think in no way do I deserve fresh sheets and towels every day, so you can understand why this all feels so unnatural. [And yet, as I write this, I am sitting in a poolside wicker chaise lounger under a palm tree, listening to the ocean and the birds while drinking a chilled beer that someone delivered before I’d even settled into my chosen seat. It seems that I have adapted somewhat!]

I admittedly have been narrow-minded about the concept of arranged marriages as well. My opinions were naively formed by the story of one friend escaping an abusive marriage and the fact that the concept of a “Love Marriage” seemed unheard of; [sure, maybe I am tainted by the romantic influence of Hollywood.] “Independence” being my middle name, the thought of meeting a potential spouse for the first time under the watchful eye of both sets of parents, not to mentions siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and any widows who might also live under your roof … well, it could not be more repulsive a thought. And please don’t get me started on the formal interviews conducted, touching on horoscope signs, education levels, and the woman’s gusto to prepare a list of outrageous demands for the man on the initial meeting. Still, I admit that the way marriage is done in the Western World is by no means idealistic; divorce rates are an undeniable testament to this. Personally speaking, the approval of my parents and brothers is top of my list, and I can imagine that where family influence is evident throughout the process, a world of hurt and mistakes could be prevented. Having discussed the concept in depth with Rohan, I came to the conclusion that while details differ, the game is exactly the same. There is still hope, still rejection, still confusion, and still butterflies. Even with our concept of long-term dating, how can you really know someone before you marry them—before you’ve experience shared finances, childbirth, tragedy, and old age together? Relationships are dynamic, whether you’ve dated for 5 years or known each other for 5 minutes prior to marriage, and I envy the concept of devotion to the marriage, commitment to the challenge, and joy in the celebration.

At the end of the day, there is one truth that is undeniable: in whatever country you received your upbringing, there is a certain amount of allegiance. Truth is what you know, absolutely dependent on the familiarities of your small world. To me, Canada is beautiful and even with its shortcoming, could not be more perfect (and I don’t even say that based strictly on our lack of slimy reptiles and oversized rodents.) I have to respect that to Indians, there is much in my world that is surely perceived as tragic and missing. The entire reason for travel and exposure to the differences of the world is to challenge one’s values and open one’s mind to extraneous possibilities, to know that while you love it, yours isn’t the only way, and to strengthen personal appreciation and basic principles.

Your country is like your family: I am aware of weaknesses in personalities, imperfections in relationship, flaws in appearances, and still I think the world should envy the fact that I live in what is undoubtedly the greatest family imaginable. Likewise, my country has its deficiencies, but it is mine and it will always receive my devotion and undying pride. If such appreciations didn’t exist, then we would have problem. And so, in the last days of my visit and with a much-anticipated return home, I choose to respect the comparable value that Indians have in their own country, complete with cobras, garbage, and the occasional sad story.