The politics of being "America-returned"... and the challenge of global citizenship

Okay, I'm fed up. Everyone I meet is trying to analyze my choices of the last few years, and they are driving me up the wall. Figure this out:

First there are the people who cant understand the decision to come back to India after completing my undergraduate degree. One of the first questions I was asked at my recent job interview was why I am choosing to return to India after doing so many "interesting things" in the USA (umm, and there's nothing interesting to be done here?). One person actually asked outright why I am "wasting" my American degree, i.e. coming back here when salaries are so much higher there... next someone will ask why I didn't just marry an American and settle down there! Others are more subtle, but their incredulity is obvious. And annoying.

Then there are a handful of people, and several recent newspaper articles, that sing praises of Indians who have "given up promising careers abroad" and come back "to help the less fortunate in their motherland." Since I am looking for work with NGOs and such, some tend to lump me with these people. Umm, no. That was NOT what I was thinking in choosing to come back. Sure, I want to work in the villages here, or in alternative education here, but I do NOT pretend to be doing it so selflessly, to be giving up what I really wanted in order to "help"; in any case, that sounds incredibly patronizing, as if those are situations where you just give and don't receive. I want to do this stuff because I enjoy it and because I have learned more in such situations that I have anywhere else; I came home because this is where I want to be. That's all; stop trying to make martyrs out of people like me and thereby demean what was really just an honest decision to come home and follow my heart.

But right now, I am most irritated with the other extreme-- the JNU-style "communist" intellectuals who insist on speaking contemptuously of my college experience in America, for no reason other than that it was in America. I just met one such person today: she tried to convince me that my education there was meaningless, that there was nothing I learned at SUA that I wouldn't have learned at Delhi University, and that there is no such thing as the "independent research" I believe I did for Capstone and for several of my classes. Anything positive I said, even to someone else in a different context (for example, my amazement at the fact that I became conversant in Spanish in just two years, whereas I cant string together a sentence of French after five years of it in high school) was brushed aside, loudly and definitively. At most, she might acknowledge that Mexico or Argentina were good for me, but America? Never.

Where do you even begin explaining yourself to such people? First off, SUA opened the doors for me to even go to Argentina and Mexico-- there was no way i was going to do that directly after college here; it simply wouldn't happen. Besides, I treasure my experiences in the USA just as much as those in Argentina and Mexico... in each of those places, I learned several important life lessons and made several incredible friends. Oh ya, she (and people like her) also think it amazing that I have friends from Mexico/ Argentina/ France/ Peru/ Japan etc., but if I talk of my American friends, they think I'm a wannabe American who can't get enough of that country. Again, how do I tell her that I don't see my friends that way? I didn't make friends with Lili because she's Peruvian; I made friends with her because she's Lili. I didn't make friends with Masako because she is French; I made friends with her because she's Masako. And I didn't make friends with Wendy or Mike because they are American; I made friends with them because they are Wendy and Mike. I don't like this arbitrary assigning of value to my friendships-- who the hell is a random stranger to decide which of my friendships is most valuable, depending simply on which country that friend comes from? Why is it that I can speak of all my other international experiences with all the love in the world and have people tell me how lucky I am to have had these experiences, but the moment I talk of my US experiences with any trace of affection or nostalgia, I'm branded a sell-out to US hegemony?

I'm far from claiming-- or believing-- that everything about the USA is great and about India terrible (let's face it-- would I have come home if I believed that?). At the same time, I will not therefore claim that everything about the USA is terrible and about India is great. I DID have a wonderful four years at college there... i cannot speak for the average American college (I don't know if that exists, and if it does, I don't know what it is), but i CAN speak for my own college experience there, and it was incredible. I DO believe that there is no other place where I could have met and befriended people from all over the world as I did in the USA. I DO respect many things about the people I have met in the USA; yes, the USA went to war in Iraq, but the USA also has the millions of people out on the street protesting that war, making their voices heard... I don't remember a single large scale protest against India's nuclear program here in the capital; yes, the USA still has its share of prejudices and doesn't allow gay marriage, but men in Delhi get arrested for being gay. And, now that I am back, I am becoming strangely defensive about these things.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad: The people who tell me this belong to the so-called "progressive" groups in India. These people think of themselves as having absolutely nothing in common with Bush. But actually, they mirror his us-against-them mindset, even if they flip who the "us" are and who the "them" are. Dr. Ikeda once defined world peace as "a global network of friendship"; as naive as some will think that, after SUA, I know it to be true. I can never fully be at peace with a label, but I cannot be otherwise with the face, the name, and the story hidden behind that label.

In a world that still thinks in terms of "nation-states," it is hard to explain a global identity. I feel I have a global identity. People I love are scattered all over the world, so I don't think of those blobs on the map as nations but simply as places where I have a friend, as the home of someone I love. I refuse to undermine any part of this identity-- the American part, the Indian part, or any other part-- and it seems like much of the next few months will be a process of making people realize that my world is not, cannot be, black and white.

jobless no more

So, after a couple of weeks of being home and holidaying, I now have a job. This morning I gave a sample spelling workshop to students at a tiny little school inside one of Delhi's many villages. Of course they were completely disorganized: my planned 60 minute workshop became 6 ten-minute workshops when i got there, each with a different grade (from 1 to 6). I went into that classroom wondering what the heck was going on; first they changed my workshop from high school to elementary school, then they made it spelling instead of creative writing, and now this?!

Much to my surprise, though, we had lots of fun. We worked with just 2 spelling rules (of course, each 10 minute workshop was just one rule), then played a version of tic tac toe with words using those rules. Trust me, you haven't truly enjoyed teaching until you have seen 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 year olds literally beg you for a new word they can try spelling! It worked out so well that I now look forward even to doing another spelling workshop! I really realized how much nicer the classroom is when you don't have to think exams and grades, and can instead focus on learning; I could never have created this classroom if I then had to grade them on what they learned today (some other teacher probably will, but that is her headache!).

March will be low-key on this job since that is when the academic year ends and kids are busy with finals; April is when things get more hectic. But as a freelancer with this program, I have quite a lot of flexibility. Exciting stuff.

There are other possibilities around the corner as well... but they are too premature to talk of right now. Still, it's good to see life falling together and realize that my super-cross-disciplinary and weird (by Indian standards!) education at SUA hasn't made me completely unemployable in India!

A peeping tom at my window

Lying on my bed a few afternoons ago, I felt someone watching me. Here's a photograph I took of the peeping tom!

This is one of the reasons I love being home; there aren't a lot of big cities I have been in where I can wake up to loud, chirping birds and scampering squirrels. And because my apartment is high up, I'm at perfect eye level with the top of this tree, which affords me the chance to look right into this world I could never access otherwise: the world that unfolds amongst the squirrels and the birds right where the trees touch the sky!

The tree, by the way, is a Gulmohar. For those of you that have read my poetry, these cocoons will blossom into the "peacock flowers" (isn't the English name for the tree lovely?) that I wrote of. While in India, I had never realized just how important this tree was to me, but while I was away, it somehow became a symbol of home. Now, I am eagerly awaiting April, when my Gulmohar blooms. I haven't seen those beautiful red flowers in five years now; just being there for this year's springtime blossoming feels like a good reason to be home!

Gosh, I have spent so time lately staring at this tree and at all its tree life. I think of Sarah Wider and of Emerson and his dialogs with nature. How blessed am I to literally wake up to nature every morning?

The many Indias

For my non-Indian readers, just to put this article in perspective: A 500 ml bottle of coke would cost about Rs. 20; a small bar of chocolate anywhere between Rs. 10 and Rs. 35. About Rs. 40 make 1 USD.

Given all the rhetoric about how much the Indian economy, and especially the consumer goods sector, is growing so fast, think about what this article means about the many Indias there are.

Where does one even begin fighting that?

A suffering Bharat vs shining India

Rahul Shrivastava

14 February 2008

It seems that the policies made in Parliament have gone just one way, away from the poor. The latest reminder is a survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation, which is asking a question - What can you do with just Rs 12 a day? Going in search of livelihood / Photo credit: NDTV Twenty per cent people in rural India have only Rs 12 a day, of which each person spends just Rs 7 on food. In Orissa and Chhattisgarh, 44% people live this life. Ever wondered why people migrate from villages to cities? The survey says life is a shade better in urban India where 22% people spend Rs 19 daily. In urban Bihar, 56% live on this amount. The Minister for Rural Development says the government's policies are insensitive. ''There are lobbies helping the rich, not the poor. There are now hundred thousand crorepatis (millionaires). But there is no clear policy for poor,'' said Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, Rural Development Minister. The devil as usual lies in the detail. On an average, people in villages spend 10% on fuel, 8% on milk, 5% on sugar and 3% on education. That's why any crisis, especially medical, pushes them towards loan sharks as rural Indians earn and spend. Saving has become a luxury. Economists feel the government cannot pretend to be surprised by the dismal figures. ''Imagine spending Rs 7-8 per person on food. Then in rural households, the man gets food first the woman last. That means weak women, weak children and that is why there's such high incidence of stunted children,'' said Rajiv Kumar, Director, ICRIER. The Parliament makes policies for the nation. But policies have ended up creating two nations, with one getting richer. Surveys are just a reminder about the other bigger entity getting poorer. Source: NDTV

http://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/157823/1/

On being a foreigner in my own city...

More than 3 years ago, I took my first literature class at SUA; that “Intro to Lit” with Ken was to define me as a student, as a writer, and as a friend in ways I could never have then imagined. Ken was a professor, but he was also a close friend, and through our conversations during his office hours, he discovered enough about my interests to suggest some amazing outside reading material. One that I still cling to, now more than ever, is Salman Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands.”

Rushdie writes about Bombay, the city he “lost” as a child when he went to boarding school in England. He writes about revisiting Bombay many years later and realizing that he could never go home to the city he remembered. Here’s how he says it:

“If we do look back, we must do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind… my India was just that: ‘my’ India, a version and no more than one version, of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions.”

I’ve thought about these words often, and now that I am back in “my city,” I know them to be true. Delhi is home, but I cannot deny that I am often a foreigner in my own city.

My India—my Delhi—was made up of so many people who have now moved on to other places. It was also made up of the absence of others who now live here and have come to mean so much to me. My Delhi was made up of school buses, exams and debates, not work, art and theatre. Having returned home after four-and-a-half years, I return with new cares, interests, and passions. I am now attempting to locate these things that I never knew existed here and never cared to find out about. Stranger still, I’m finding them here. As I attend poetry nights, plays, and cultural festivals, I realize I am in a city I never knew… I don’t feel like the Delhi Aditi; right now, I feel like the Buenos Aires Aditi. But I like being able to be the Buenos Aires Aditi in New Delhi.

I don’t always recognize this city; so much has changed while I have been away—new roads, metro construction, fancy buses… the upcoming Commonwealth Games in 2010 can already be seen all over Delhi's roads. There are also moments when I am in the middle of something familiar, like trying to convince some auto-guy to take me where I want to go, or eating chaat on the street, or talking to an artisan in Dilli Haat, when a part of me steps outside the situation and smiles at it, as an outsider would. I think of friends around the world and try to figure out how they would react, what they would make out of the madness, the chaos, and the color that is New Delhi. I think especially of my Mexican and Argentine friends, whose homes I have lived in, whose cultures I have shared, and long to share my home and my city with them. And I long to take one of my SUA friends through a whirlwind tour of Delhi’s by-lanes, of the special street foods you get here, of the abandoned historical monuments that even I have never visited. I’m trying to live in this city like an insider, but at least for a while, I too will explore it like a foreigner. I need to re-appropriate it these spaces as who i am now.

Every so often, some cursory remark will remind me that the city doesn’t always recognize me either. Some auto-wallah or shopkeeper in Janpath will quote exorbitant prices to me and either talk to me in a badly imitated American accent or at least insist on saying, “Madam, forty rupees” even as I tell him “kya baat kar rahe ho, tees rupay bante hain.” Once, I got into a long conversation and finally convinced a seller that I was not a foreigner or an NRI (Non-resident Indian)… that I am very much from here.

But am I? And what does that mean, being “from here”? When I worked in the leprosy colony beyond Shahadra (on the outskirts of Delhi) 2 years ago, I was constantly struck by how little I knew of that Delhi—the Delhi where all the hoardings are in Hindi, where no woman ever wears jeans, and where I’ve been referred to as “an educated person” (yeh padhe-likhe log) with unmistakable contempt. I remember how hard it was to convince the women in that colony that I could speak Hindi… even as I talked to them in Hindi, they looked at my jeans and couldn’t understand that I can speak Hindi and wear jeans at the same time. It was a revelation, and a moment of questioning: how can I belong here, without shedding the clothes I grew up in? I don’t think I ever found an answer, other than that there are many Delhis, many Indias, and living in one doesn’t automatically guarantee me entry into another.

But there are also moments when the years in between seem to vanish in a single remark. Last week, when I went to borrow the latest Harry Potter from 3L—a tiny, family-run, commercial library near my house that has been around since my mother was in school—I was pleasantly surprised at the smile of recognition from the owner. What shocked me was the way he whipped out the register to the exact page with my address, read out my mother’s name, and noted down what I was borrowing. Let me stress: I haven’t set foot in that place in the last five years i.e. I last went there as a high school student with long hair, looking considerably different from how I look now. I was surprised enough that the guy behind the counter recognized me, but the way he casually opened the register to my page without a moment's hesitation, as if I were a regular there, was eerily familiar. In Rushdie’s words, “I felt as if I were being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were illusions, and that this continuity was the reality.” Is it?

Searching again, in earnest

Whoever "a posteriori" is, you were right... I did stop writing. I am not sure why, but I guess I am re-evaluating the point of this blog, which i had set up to share my Mongolian adventures. I refuse to write a public personal diary, and during these days sitting at home, I havent done anything "interesting enough" to put here.

Today, however, I go for my first real job interview in India. Within the week, I am also meeting a close friend's close friend, who promises to be exciting and might be able to take me with her on some interesting journeys through rural India and the lives of Indian farmers. Let's see how both those things go... looking for my niche back here is certainly proving more interesting than I had thought it would be. Hopefully, one of those will work out to liven this blog a little! :)

Small talk

So, I have been back home for a few days now, and the combination of warmer weather, home-cooked food, LOTS of rest, and proper medication has helped a lot: I feel much better today and hope to have recovered fully within a few days. Then, sometime next week, I will begin to search for a new adventure.

With all this time in bed, I have had WAY too much time for thinking, and for some reason, I have been thinking a lot about the importance of smalltalk... I don't know if these thoughts will be interesting to any of you, but I am throwing them out anyway.

So... I first began thinking about smalltalk while I was in Mexico last summer. In the village where I worked, we would often have lunch with a local family, and there were also lots of other visits to people's homes for coffee, for dinner, for tortilla-making workshops-- you get the general idea. I made several of these visits with my friend Cesar, who is from the city of Puebla, only 3-4 hours away from the village we worked in. Now, by this time, I was fluent in Spanish and understood all of his conversations with people in Zoatecpan... yet, I found myself hard pressed to find topics for conversation myself. Sometime during those 7 weeks, I realized just how culturally defined smalltalk is. Maybe you can talk about the weather in England, but if you did it on a not out-of-the-ordinary day in Mexico, people might look at you funny ("duh, it's raining...so? It rains everyday"). I also had to learn that you are better off not asking someone for an onion to accompany your meal (onions are expensive, and not every house can afford them) but asking for chillies will only make them happy (everyone in Mexico has chillies at home, and they are usually amused/ pleased at your attempt to enjoy them). I guess the one universal theme is that you can always talk to mothers about how cute their kids are and inquire after all the details about their children... that works everywhere I have been! But in general, I realized that it was one thing to know the language and to be able to talk about academics or work or whatever... but to be able to make "meaningless" chit-chat, you had to be well informed about the culture you were in.

But now I am not thinking about the difficulties associated with smalltalk; I am thinking of its importance. As I sit down to write emails to my friends from different worlds, I am sometimes struck by how there's nothing to write about. And yet, while we were together at Soka, or in Mexico, or in Argentina, or even in Mongolia, we always had to talk of; there was never any effort involved (except the effort to make oneself understood in Mongolia!). We often talked for hours-- how many dinner conversations at SUA lasted until way after the cafeteria was closed and everyone had gone home? And how many times were Chris, Sarah and I up past 2 in the morning chatting in some cafe in Buenos Aires? So how can I have "nothing to write about" to the same people now?

Because so much of these conversations-- so much of what brought us together-- wasn't really any important conversation (there were those too, but fewer and further between). So much of it was just chit-chat. But that "just" is not intended to undermine its importance: that chit-chat has been the foundation of every friendship (let's face it: intense conversations are fun once in a while, but I would run like hell from someone with whom I had to have one every time we met!). But for some reason, I have imbibed this weird notion that one doesn't write about those things; only writes about "important" stuff. Maybe this comes from how letters took forever to reach the recipient: if I could only write 2 handwritten pages to you a month, then of course I would think of making them important! But in the age of email, it makes less sense. I miss the smalltalk. Its absence makes every email intense; so different from coming away from a most enjoyable chat not even entirely sure what you just talked about, only that it was fun.

And I guess, in a weird way, this blog entry was an attempt to do just that: talk about something that isn't necessarily meaningful but that you would probably have heard about if you had gone for a walk or a coffee with me today!