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.