walking

i walk a lot here. sometimes upwards of 1-2 hours a day, purely for transportation. i hate taking autos (and they're expensive), and often the city bus system (which is really cheap) will only get you about half-way where you want to go. walking here is a little bit of a skill: constantly going from non-functional sidewalk into the street, around trees (which actually grow in the streets here), piles of rubble, goats chickens cows, sleeping dogs, dodging crumbling manholes, missing chunks of sidewalk that reach down to murky sewage water, being constantly not-quite-hit by autos, cars, bicycles, buses with bellowing horns, trying not to run into the usual cluster fuck of crowds and not step in who-knows-what on the ground (really... shit, food, who knows what it is...). when i first got here i was advised to walk in the street as though i were a water buffalo: with no concern or reaction on my face.

i've been realizing just how much you can tell about a person here by how they are dressed. cross reference with location and age and you have a pretty good idea of a person's background, what topics of conversation you might have with them. i'll start with men:
the typical would be nondescript sandals, button-down cotton shirt, pants. then there are variations:
-shoes: wearing no shoes at all is also pretty common. wearing closed-toed shoes instantly means more wealth.
-pants or lungi/dhotti (a kind of skirt, sometimes tucked up to be more like a mini skirt): wearing jeans and especially shorts (!) automatically jumps you to the higher echelons. the dudes on the street are all wearing pants, whereas the guys on the street wearing a dhotti seem more like workers, or like they live/work in the area, probably are more likely to not be wearing shoes. but the dhotti is also formal wear... a wealthy well-educated guy might wear a nice dhotti to a wedding. and old men on the street are also more likely to wear a dhotti... probably a white one in contrast to the usually printed plaid of the work dhotti.
-shirt: knit cotton/polo shirt again automatically jumps to a different level.

for women:
-sari: the worker women on the street are usually in saris as are older, wealthy brahmin women, but they're totally different: the worker women wear more nylon fabrics or simple cottons whereas older wealthy women would wear shiny silk/cotton
-salwar kameez: the uniform of younger women and middle aged women of the middle class. wearing a chudhidar (kameez top with tight, bunched up legging-like pants, an import from north india) is more stylish.
-jeans+kurta/western clothes: college students, more educated, wealthier

of course, these are not rules, they're only my observations....

for hindus (well, at least men...) you can also often tell what deity they worship. a shiva worshipper (iyer) will sometimes have ~3 white stripes across the forehead, whereas a vishnu worshipper (iyengar) will have a thin white U or V reaching down between the eyebrows sometimes with an orange vertical stripe in the middle.

i see all of this as part of this characteristic of public-ization here: so many things that in the us we're used to thinking of as private events become public actions in india. the streets are a place not just for walking and transportation, but for eating, shopping, socializing, drinking (tea or coffee... drinking alcohol is also done on the streets but not out in public), sleeping, peeing, playing, working (sawing wood, welding, car mechanics, tailoring clothing, etc.), brushing teeth, pumping water, shitting, worshipping (street temples are everywhere). everyone's all up in each others business here because it's all in public anyway. privacy is a major luxury.

i think when i first got to india, the life i saw on the streets is what i assumed was the "real" india. so when i would go to a coffee shop where wealthy and well-educated people come to drink expensive cappucino and look out at the street through floor-to-ceiling glass windows in the comfort of AC and the security of a guard watching their cars parked out front (places where I don't feel strange getting out my laptop), at first I considered these places "not-india," an escape or reaction against india. but really, the longer i stay here the more i realize that these places are just as much a part of modern india. sure, these places (which emerged only with the IT boom) are an escape from the insanity of the streets, but they're just as important an element of the face of modern india.

which i've been realizing, the longer i spend here, and the more of india i see, the less i feel like i have a good idea of what india "is." india is everything. it is cow-drawn carts in the street and swank highrises, barefoot flower-sellers and open sewers, laptop-toting businessmen and engineering schools, groups of young men pilgrims, white poweder smeared on their foreheads, all wearing the same color taking each others pictures with cameraphones, beggarwomen without fingers, old women in shiny silk saris whose children all live in the us, young couples wearing jeans going on dates, movie stars (not just bollywood but kollywood, tollywood...), marathon runners, the smallest men and women i've ever seen (how big you are here correlates pretty directly with how much money you have... not just fat, but physical size), old man pilgrims with wild eyes and crazy hair. india is so many religions, so many languages, so many individual states with their own individuality and identity (and new ones struggling to emerge all the time). even within a single religion, hinduism, there are so many different deities, so many different ways to worship. india's kind of a place where you do whatever you want because there is no one set way to do anything. i still feel here like i have no idea what's happening around me about 90% of the time, but really, i don't think anyone else does either, even people who've lived their whole lives here.

so, i've been struggling to figure out where i fit in here, who are the people i'm supposed to be friends with, what place in society i'm supposed to take. and i really still have no idea. while this has been frustrating, i think overall it's good, maybe it's why i came here. last year i started to think about defining "adulthood" as beginning at the time when you know who you are. eventually it becomes harder to throw everything to the wind and just strike out in a new direction. and really, eventually this is probably for the best. there's a major contradiction in my life between continuity and change... learning new things vs getting better at the things i already do. i feel like somewhere in this last year this transition happened to me maybe. as awesome as india is, i'm frustrated by the parts of my life i can't pursue here (contemporary music and climbing mostly... but cosmology too, though that's probably easier to do here than the others), parts of my life i don't think i'm willing to give up, and it makes me wonder if i can really be happy living anywhere besides the us (or, maybe the western world) (when did i become this square!? jeez). while i struggle with this here, maybe this is also an opportunity. one of my neighbors here is a pretty well-known musician and musicologist; i met him recently and he told me to learn music here like a child: don't learn grammar, analytically; learn by listening, absorbing without analysis or judgment. how much more we can learn before we get all caught up in what we already know.

the dude is now

in india, there is always the dude. the auto driver always has his friend hanging out, there's always the guy on the bus who seems to know the driver, always groups of men hanging out with each other sitting on the street. beyond just the dude, men seem to have a very special bond with each other. men holding hands on the street, behaving close and affectionate, is very common (whereas seeing men holding hands with women is pretty uncommon). the corresponding relationship seems largely to not exist between women, or at least to a much lesser degree. i'm not sure what the cause is (homosexuality is societally unaccepted)... i think it has a lot to do with the structure of society.. men seem to have much more free time than women... or at least, a lot more public free time... and maybe the male-male affection fills a hole not filled by marriage, which often seems a bit like a more functional relationship...?

speaking of marriage, it took me a while to realize that most marriages here simply function totally differently than what we think of as marriage... the expectation is completely different, the relationship doesn't serve the same purpose... they are effectively a totally different thing... and yet societally they have a very similar place and importance. i should say, i'm speaking of arranged marriages (which are juxtaposed in india against "love marriages"). marriage arrangement is still very common and happens at all levels of society (although dowries supposedly don't exist anymore, it seems like they can also still be important, mostly for lower classes). in a way, it seems like marriage here, as i mentioned above, is a very functional relationship. getting married is something that just happens when you reach a certain age... find a suitable match and it happens (A right person at THE right time rather than THE right person at A right time...maybe?).... it's a stage of life, something that happens. the relationship between husband and wife (at least initially) is a functional one (they could be nearly complete strangers); the expectations are therefore totally different. in some ways i feel like it's a healthier (or maybe realistic?) view of the relationship than how we view it in the west, where we idealize marriage as finding your soulmate/the person who completes you, etc... which seems to me (yes, i am cynical...very) to almost set itself up to fail. not that indian weddings always succeed... certainly there are innumerable examples where it doesn't work, and the lack of empowerment of brides (at least historically) resulted in a lot of nightmarish situations. but it's just interesting to think about completely different approaches to this relationship which is considered so pivotal in both cultures.

finally, a brief return to the ant issue... they eat everything! they seem to just choose/find something at random and completely take it over... there's not much that's more annoying after taking a shower than finding your towel full of tiny biting ants. ha. after twice returning to chennai from traveling to find infestations of my laptop (AHHH!) (and once of my bassoon case (AAHHH!!), luckily they were more interested in chewing on the foam of the case than the instrument), i think i've finally found a way to keep things safe: chalk for cockroach killing. seems to have quelled the onslaught well so far... maybe a little too well... i just hope i'm not poisoning myself in the process...

kerala: lovely!

didn't get a chance to finish this post before i left chennai to travel again: about a week ago i got back from traveling for about a week through kerala and tamil nadu with a friend from chennai: quite wonderful! hills and trees and clean air hooray!! rice patties, palm trees, rolling hills of tea bushes, cardamom coffee pepper plantations, eucalyptus and rubber tree groves, fields of sugar cane. so much green!

started out in fort cochin, beautiful chinese fishing nets, much more impressive than i was expecting. huge spider-web-like nets draped from long wooden arms, rocks hanging from ropes used as counterweights to help the fishermen heave the nets out of the water.
women sifting piles of ginger at a spice factory in jew town (yes, they actually call it that), cochin and the view towards ernakulam. i had no idea the depth of jewish history in kerala: most of the population arrived to cranganore around 70 CE as exiles from israel and a jewish kingdom was created around 370 CE. suppression began in the 1520s by the muslims then portuguese then dutch, and today most of the population has emigrated to israel (according to wikipedia...).
after cochi, we headed for alleppey, a main gateway town to the keralan backwaters, a system of something like 900km of canals, lined with forest and palm trees, village houses, footpaths and bridges, inland revealing fields of the most saturating green rice patties. took a town ferry to a smaller village, happy school kids all piling into the ferry to make the commute home. we got off in a village about 10km away, wandered inland to the rice patties where the landscape opens up and you feel as you look out, you're looking back in time.

from alleppey, we moved on to munnar, arriving at 9pm on new years eve to find the only place that had room was actually under renovation but was renting two rooms in the un-renovated part... at 300Rs for a double (about $6), it was probably over-priced by indian standards. but the view the next morning was lovely: dappled green hill sides shimmering with tea bushes, we wandered into the hills to get some sights: beautiful! there's a nice tea museum (actually, the history of tea in the region seems to be relatively short, developed mainly by the british in the mid 1800s), and apparently the company that runs it is a 70% worker owned coop. though sadly when we asked what kind of tea they used to make the (delicious) tea they serve at the museum, the guy pulled out a bag of instant tea-from-a-machine. hilarious.

we then headed down into the valley that evening to stay at a spice plantation 20km away from munnar (yes, the most expensive place i've stayed in india, but a relaxing break). the guy at the hotel told us there were cardamom, pepper, and coffee plants in the plantation, but i was a little embarrassed that i had no idea what the plants looked like. once we finally identified them, suddenly they were everywhere we looked (annie dillard yes).

we encountered these women on the road through the plantation as they were eating an early lunch (with maybe half a bottle of some kind of brandy-colored liquid poured into a big pan?). they were really friendly and showed me how to pick cardamom, pretty back-breaking work.

this post is getting long, so i'll write about tamil nadu in the next one.