Views from the Train

Kerala

Going from place to place in India has so far involved traveling by train, which has both its rewards and its challenges. Buying a ticket can be an ordeal; sleeping in a second-class sleeper berth requires a certain imperviousness both to grime and to noise (a lot of noise); and the timetable always seems to get you to your destination in the middle of the night.

Still, it's incredibly cheap, and the views by day can be lovely.

Boys playing cricket, Karnataka

Kerala schoolgirls

Karnataka countryside

More views from the trains here - we'll add to the category as the trip goes on.

Another Palolem Pic

I liked Palolem; it was as though the Beach God decided to demonstrate what he could do to design a perfect beach without the blazing white sand or turquoise/crystal water of the travel agency cliches, and the overall effect, I think, was gorgeous. It still had the coconut-tree-lined crescent of sand and the water temperature pitched somewhere between heated swimming pool and bathwater, but it also came with a little island you could climb around at low tide, and a backwater filled with wildlife - kingfishers, herons, monkeys, fish - which made for a nice little cruise.

We'll get more pictures up of Palolem and Varkala, as well as the Kerala backwaters, in the next few days.

Beaches: Palolem and Varkala

We've spent most of the past week and a half lying on beaches, first Palolem Beach in Goa, which was calm and idyllic, and then Varkala Beach in southern Kerala, which had big dramatic waves and the tourist strip perched precariously on a cliff above it. We overheard someone saying Varkala was like "Europe in the sky," referring to the number of tourists, but I'm not convinced that any European eats that many banana pancakes or listens to Hotel California that incessantly when they're actually in Europe!

We didn't really mean to do both beaches consecutively but it ended up that way due to another quirk of the Indian transportation system: We tried to buy a ticket from Goa to Kochi, planning to work our way down the Kerala coast to Varkala gradually, but were only able to buy a ticket that took us all the way to the south of Kerala, so we figured we'd just work our way back up the coast slowly instead! That meant a fourteen hour train ride from Mangalore which arrived at Varkala at 4 in the morning, so we ended up sitting around on the platform for three hours until the sun came up and we were able to head to the beach to find a place to stay.

Chowpatty Beach

photo by Paul

Rachel and I lived in Bangkok for a while a few years back. Like Bangkok, Mumbai is huge, noisy, and traffic-choked. Unlike Bangkok, Mumbai has the sea - at its most charming at Chowpatty beach, where families and tourists come to play and watch the sunset.

Above three photos by Rachel

Chowpatty beach is also home of Mumbai's famous street food, bhelpuri, which is like one of those wild, crazy parties you sometimes hear about but never seem to get invited to, if that party were a salad:

Photo by Rachel, eaten by Paul

Again, click on any picture for higher-resolution version.

Cricket on the Oval Maidan

There was a little snafu with some of the photo uploads, so I'm still only getting to some of the Mumbai pictures now. Anyway, click on the picture for a larger size.

More Mumbai photos here.

Transportation curiosities, and what we were doing in Sangli

I was expecting to find the traffic in Mumbai terrifying. I don't know if I've just gotten braver over the past few years or if the pace of traffic in Mumbai is nothing compared to Bangkok and Managua but riding around in taxis turned out to be the most thrilling and fascinating part of our three short days in the city. Catching fleeting glimpses of temples, slums, luxury apartment complexes, and street markets all unceremoniously crowded together on the same streets left me constantly straining my neck to see what was going on and wishing we had more time to explore the city. A few extra days probably wouldn't have made much of a difference though--Mumbai seems like the kind of city you have to live in to even start to understand.

It's not just a stereotype that everything in India is colorful, nor is it an exaggeration that the bureaucracy here is insane. We managed to spend practically a whole day booking our train ticket from Mumbai to Sangli, although this was partly because we took a taxi all the way to the station before realizing we needed our ATM cards and had to go all the way back to where we were staying to get them. The reason we needed our ATM cards, despite having enough cash on us to buy the tickets, was that in order to buy tickets as a foreigner you have to prove your foreigner status by showing an ATM receipt for the cash you're using to pay (in addition to showing your passport)! We then had to find the special foreigner ticket window and wait with the other foreigners on a bench marked "foreign tourist only"! We eventually got our tickets, but they were only provisional tickets, meaning we were second and third in line to get seats if people canceled, so we had to go back the next day to confirm that we could actually get on the train. We then had to come back one hour later to find out what seats we had been allocated!

Anyway, it all worked out and we finally got on the sleeper to Sangli, where we had been invited to visit the offices of SANGRAM, an organization that provides outreach, support, community, and services to sex workers in certain regions of Maharastra and Karnataka. I hadn't been on a sleeper since I was a kid and I was so excited that I didn't sleep at all. Every time we stopped at a station the noises coming from outside made it sound like we were at an amusement park instead of a train station. We arrived in Sangli at 5:20am, where we were met by one of SANGRAM's staff members and taken in a rickshaw cab to the SANGRAM office, where we managed to sleep for a couple of hours before being woken at 9:30 for breakfast.

That day, after hearing a brief history of SANGRAM and its sister and brother organizations, VAMP (serving female sex workers) and MUSKAN (serving male sex workers), we talked with some of the women from VAMP and sat in on one of their weekly organizational meetings, where delegates from different regions reported back on outreach they had done that week, issues in each region, and plans for the next few weeks. Some topics of discussion included finding housing for the children of a sex worker who wasn't able to take care of them and reaching out to home-based sex workers who are reluctant to visit drop in centers. I had heard all about how huge and wide-reaching Indian sex worker organizations are but you have to see them in action to really understand what that means. I've never seen such a practical, focused and well-organized meeting and I was left wondering why it's so difficult to organize sex workers in the US (and other Western countries). I was also inspired to start thinking a lot more about plans for organizing after we get back home.


After the meeting we visited the offices of MUSKAN, where some of the boys from the group performed in drag, carrying out a traditional fertility ritual which involved handing out vegetables and putting tumeric on our foreheads (see picture!). The entertainment continued with dancing and acting out various well-known (apparently) scenes from Bollywood movies.

We then repaid SANGRAM for all their hospitality by running off to Goa with their only set of office keys, which then had to be couriered back to Sangli (at least eight hours by road I think) at top speed before they could get back into their offices for work. Yeah, we're still feeling pretty guilty about that.

Mumbai Taxi

Traffic in Mumbai, like baseball, is a game of inches. If you don't like baseball, the metaphor still works - as it seems to go on forever and the rules are bewildering.

My first impression of Mumbai taxi drivers was that they were trying to kill me. Then I decided that the safest place around a Bombay taxi was actually inside it. But as we realized - I think Rachel was the first to point it out - the rules of the road, to abuse a phrase, actually seem to work. What would seem in many other places - even New York - like psychopathic road behavior seems to work perfectly well in Mumbai; everyone slows down or veers out of the way at the last possible moment with no ill will on either side, and nobody's actually getting killed (I'm sure the statistics disagree, but the point is they can't be as bad as the situation looks at first glance).

Rachel and I both felt as though we spent half our time in the city seeing it from the back of a cab - but it was actually sort of enjoyable. Mumbai's taxis are 40 year old Fiats stripped of nonessentials like seatbelts and often painted up and decaled with pictures of Ganesh or tigers or whatever else. Watching the city go by from the back seat is pretty fascinating, offering glimpses of a place you begin to understand has many more layers than you can even start to peel back in a few days' time.

School Stairs

Stairs at a school, Mumbai - pic by Rachel

Gateway to India

Only Europeans would build something in a port city and call it the Gateway to India. Everybody else came via Afghanistan.

Anyway, we're here, six days in, and finally have a chance to post. I'm writing from Sangli, a provincial town in Southern Maharashtra - why we're here is for a later post. We spent four days in Mumbai, and it wasn't enough. It's a massive, frenetic city but it has a distinct charm. I'll try to describe it more later - for now I want to get some pictures up in a series of posts.

I hesitate to say it, because I don't want to get into exoticizing places and because a lot of traveling around is grubby and difficult, but since we've been here I keep having moments where I feel as though I'm in a movie. Careening around Mumbai in a taxi, making our way through the masses of people heading into Victoria Terminus (now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, as a cab driver made a point of telling us) on their way home from work, watching families play in the sunset at Chowpatty Beach, laying awake in a sleeper on the night train, watching the MUSKAN guys perform traditional harvest festival dances and act out Bollywood scenes resplendent in sari-wrapped drag (again, more later), cruising the streets of Sangli in a big white Land Rover listening to Indian pop music and watching the oxcarts, autorickshaws, bearded old men, women in saris, schoolkids in uniforms, fruit vendors, motorcycles, goats, palm trees, everything - there's this series of moments that all feel so cinematic.

Oh, as for the top picture, of the Taj hotel and the Gateway - if you didn't know what had happened here, you wouldn't know what happened here. Everything is open for business and life seems to be very much going on for people in Mumbai.

Lots of pics in subsequent posts - probably another day or two.

The Mumbai Tiger

Tammany Tiger (Source)

This may be the last post before we get to India - we're off to London tomorrow and flying from Heathrow on Monday evening, arriving in Bombay/Mumbai on Tuesday.

As for what to call it, I'll stick with Mumbai since that's the common usage these days, but Suketu Mehta makes a pretty good case for Bombay. The official name change, he observes, was decreed by the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party when it won control of the Maharashtra state government in 1995. As Mehta describes it, after the Sena had formed a majority coalition with the BJP,

the government took a look at the awesome urban problems plaguing the city, the infestation of corruption at all levels of the bureaucracy and the government, the abysmal state of Hindu-Muslim relations, and took decisive action. They changed the name of the capital city to Mumbai.

Mehta compares the Sena to the old political machines of American cities, ensuring service delivery and delivering jobs to the urban poor in exchange for votes. The Tammany tiger lives again - the same animal is used to symbolize the Sena. And like Tammany, the latter organization's ascent marks, for better and for worse, the arrival in power of a new class of urban resident. The old urban elites and their noblesse oblige concern with good government are increasingly irrelevant:

The new inheritors of the country - and of the city - are very different from the ones who took over from the British, who had studied at Cambridge and the Inner Temple and come back. They are badly educated, unscrupulous, lacking a metropolitan sensibility - buffoons and small-time thugs, often - but, above all, representative....

The cities of India are going through a transition similar to what American cities went through at the turn of the twentieth century, when the political machines of the Democratic party dominated, bringing new immigrants jobs and political power while breaking a few heads along the way. Eventually, as in the American cities, there will be reform movements, reform candidates, to clean out the muck. In Bombay, this has not yet happened.

Mehta laments the impact of the new rulers on the city he loves - their violence, incompetence, and corruption - but he sheds few tears for the old ruling class, who hardly left the city in a good state.

One notable difference between Tammany and the Sena is that the former was an immigrant machine, while the Sena began as an organization of Maharashtrians - the mostly working-class locals who constitute the plurality of Mumbai's residents but who had traditionally been excluded from power by the city's cosmopolitan elites. The Maharashtrians had always called it Mumbai; the cosmopolitans had always called it Bombay. Now the Maharashtrians are in power.

In recent decades, the Shiv Sena has sought to move beyond its original Marathi base and style itself a party of Hindu nationalism in general. Most notoriously, the party was allegedly a prime instigator and organizer of the vicious 1992 communal riots during which hundreds of Muslims were massacred.

Some reports have suggested that the Sena may be losing its potency amid an internal succession battle and accusations of diluting its program, though it seems to have done well in Maharashtra's 2007 elections. As with Tammany, its legacy will probably live on long after the tiger itself is gone.

Jellybean Queen

H.M. Queen Elizabeth II, rendered in Jelly Bellies. Shop window, St. Andrews, Scotland. Click on picture for larger size.

Approaching Maximum

So a week from today we'll be arriving in Mumbai (or Bombay, more on that later). I've been reading Suketu Mehta's marvelous Maximum City, an in-depth look at the city's sprawling array of fascinations and crises - politics, gangs, social life, sex trade, and more, written by an expat Indian who has returned to the city after years living in Jackson Heights, Queens. It's equal parts thrilling and disturbing.

One point Mehta dwells on is just how many people are jammed together in Mumbai, on land reclaimed from the sea and filled in among a series of islands. With 14 million people, Mumbai is one of the most populous metro areas in the world. It's also the densest: Mehta reports that, in 1990, the city had a population density of 17,550 people per square mile. New York City, by comparison, has about 2,180 per square mile. The comparison seems less mind-boggling if you consider that Manhattan itself has a density of about 70,000 per square mile - but Mehta's number for Mumbai seems to be on the low end of the estimates I can find, and it's reported that, in some areas of the city - the slums - a single square mile can be home to as many as one million people.

For Mehta, these numbers are alarming - and more alarming still is the stream of new arrivals turning up in Mumbai every day. One of his points is that, for all the indifference Bombay's residents show toward the rest of India - a country to which, he says, they literally turn their backs, preferring to gaze west toward the Arabian Sea - their city cannot be saved unless other systemic problems in the country are first addressed:

What makes Bombay overpopulated is the impoverishment of the countryside, so that a young man with dreams in his head will take the first train to Bombay to live on the footpath [i.e., living on the streets or sidewalks without shelter]. If you fix the problems of the villages, you fix, as a happy side effect, the problems of the cities.

I found this interesting after having read Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods - a highly-praised account of modern India and its challenges. Luce argues precisely the opposite: India, he says, isn't urbanizing enough. Sixty years of post-independence policy has prioritized preservation of village life and neglected the development of cities. To Luce, this is a major source of misery in both city and country: there are just too many people in the villages, he argues. Land holdings, divided among so many peasants, are simply too small to be profitable, even for bare subsistence, and are certainly too small for the kind of mechanization that could make India's agricultural sector productive enough to drive a sustained economic expansion.

The solution, Luce believes, is for many more people to leave the villages and move to the cities - to build a modern economy while those left behind in the countryside can consolidate land holdings enough to make them at least modestly profitable. Luce accuses India's federal government of ignoring the problems of the cities - allowing the ongoing existence of massive slums, which are indicators of an urbanization process the government obstinately refuses to acknowledge, much less encourage. India should be focusing on making its cities decent places to live - rationalizing land use, improving service delivery, and planning for a more urbanized future. In other words, pace Mehta, Luce says: if you fix the problems of the cities, you fix, as a happy side effect, the problems of the villages.

I have no idea who's right on this question, but I'm inclined to believe that Luce's argument makes more sense. I don't expect that a whirlwind trip through India will really shed much more light on the matter, but it's something I'll be thinking about as we arrive in Maximum City.

What do you do? and other annoyances

A few weeks before we left New York, I met up with a British friend of mine who was visiting from the UK. Almost the first thing she said to me as we sat down for coffee was “How can you live in this city full of self-centred people?” She went on to explain that she’d met twenty or thirty Americans in the last few days and not one of them had asked what she did. I laughed, because I used to feel exactly the same way when I first moved to the US.

I felt confused and frustrated by the American version of social interaction, in which one is expected to just start talking about whatever seems interesting at the time, rather than waiting to be asked a string of standard and predictable questions. I tended to sit silently through parties, waiting to be asked about myself and then leaving at the end of the night feeling dejected and wondering why nobody was interested enough to even ask what I did. It took me years to adjust to this particular cultural difference and to develop the spontaneity and courage required to converse the American way; I’m still not sure if I’m quite there, but these days I find I much prefer it.

Since we’ve been in the UK I’ve been doing my best to dodge what now feels like an oppressive torrent of “What do you do?” “What do you do?” “What do you do?” (And not just because I don’t really have an answer at the moment!) To start every initial conversation with that question now seems not only boring but also presumptuous and sort of invasive, possibly as much so as “Are you married?” and “Do you have children?” (both of which I should probably prepare myself to answer multiple times once we get to Asia!) While it may sound cheesy to say so, having the freedom to choose what to tell people about yourself is just one of the things I appreciate about living in New York.

We’ve also been pondering the differences between British and American college towns, in response to being overwhelmed by the rubbishness of pubs in St.Andrews! Why is it that even the most isolated college towns in the US have at least a couple of punk rock/queer/”alternative” bars, while British college towns just have the same slick, pseudo-classy chains that you’d find all over the country, plus a few local old man pubs? Considering how relatively cosmopolitan St.Andrews is for its size, it should be surprising but probably isn’t to most Brits. We came up with various unconvincing theories as to why this is, from “because Americans have to travel further to get to college towns” and “because Americans are more likely to stay in college towns after they graduate” (I’m not even sure if that’s true) to the even vaguer “probably the same reason that New York is better than London, whatever that is.”

I’m going to try not to be this intolerant throughout the whole trip!

On Development

Rachel gave me a copy of Dreams from My Father recently - good timing as I'd been putting off buying it myself until after the election, for fear of liking it too much (given the prospect, however unlikely, that Obama might lose). I finished it a few days ago and found that I was just as impressed by it as I suspected I might be.

As anyone who's read it knows, it's a book about a lot of things, including identity, family, and community. It's also, in some respects, about development. One thing I found particularly interesting was how Obama made connections among his childhood experiences in Indonesia, his visit to Kenya, and his work in Chicago. I was struck, for example, by this passage, ruminating on how the breakdown of the local retail economy affected the poor Chicago community of Altgeld Gardens:

Now...I saw those Djarkarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than the folks out in Altgeld.... And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust.

It was the absense of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself.... For how long could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars?

Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Back, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair.

There are a lot of things at work here. Obama certainly isn't the only person to have made observations along these lines, but it's noteworthy that the next US president will be someone who not only has first-hand experience of living in the developing world, but is willing to problematize the notion of "development" in such a way that is mindful of the effect of economic globalization and change on those left behind.

I've also been reading Amartya Sen's "Development as Freedom," which is a magnificent work aimed in large part at redefining our notion of development in a way that bases the notion not primarily on economic indicators like GDP, but on how the capacity of individual people to achieve their desired goals in life is enhanced or degraded. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that Sen's work has had quite the influence it deserves in the decade since the book was written, but if his arguments are to be expressed in policy - and I think that, ultimately, they will be - it will require leaders with the capacity to grasp them instinctually. Reading the passage above from Dreams gave me a little more hope on that account.

The passage also points out that there is a logic to the way that communities develop and function, and that disruption of those communities in the name of progress can leave people poorer in ways that outsiders might not anticipate or even find credible. It's an interesting lesson in light of some of what I've been reading about urban issues in India, but that's for another post.

Edinburgh: Winter Wonderland

That was the name of the funfair, anyway. We spent the day hanging out with some friends in what I think is Britain's most beautiful, atmospheric city. Rode a couple of rides and stopped in to warm up at the Elephant House, where J.K. Rowling is said to have written the first Harry Potter novel during the days when she couldn't afford to heat her own apartment.

More photos here.

Happy New Year from St. Andrews

St. Andrews Cathedral

New Year, pleasantly old town.

Before the Reformation, [St. Andrews] was the centre of religious life in medieval Scotland, with the bishops wielding great influence over both church and state. St Andrews is also famous as a place of learning. The university, founded in 1410-11, is the third oldest in Britain.

The first Culdee Church is said to have been erected on Lady Craig's Rock at the end of the pier in the early years of Christianity in Scotland. Next came the Church of the Blessed Mary of the Rock at Kirkhill above the harbour, the foundations of which can be seen today. Then came the Church of St Rule, built on the same site as the Cathedral - St Rule's Tower remains the most intact structure within the grounds. The Cathedral itself dates from around 1160, and was consecrated in the presence of Robert the Bruce in July 1318.

Visitors to the Cathedral today will enjoy the dramatic setting of the ruins - the Cathedral was destroyed by a mob roused by the preaching of John Knox in the town during the Reformation.

Happily, the only mobs out today are those in the coffee shops and pubs celebrating another day off for Hogmanay.